Author: Apricot and Pear

Yangon, India Street.

"Hello, I want to find Miss Shantanu."

Just like many historical Chinese and overseas Chinese settlements around the world are called Chinatowns.

This Indian neighborhood, which is only next to the west of the city, was already settled here by Indian Sikhs wearing big headscarves in the colonial era of the 19th century.

The whole street is very Indian.

Here, in addition to listening to exotic national songs, seeing Indian-style lotus lanterns floating along the river on the Ilova River, and buying authentic Mumbai hand-catched curry rice and Indian flying cakes, many gold stores have also been opened.

When Gu Weijing walked into a gold shop with Hindi (Tiancheng) hanging.

The Mumbai guy behind the counter was reading a novel with a white tiger printed on the cover, and he was enjoying it.

Gu Weijing recognized that this was his classmate Shantanu's favorite extracurricular reading material - "White Tiger".

It is India's gloomy and dark version of "When Happiness Comes Knocks the Door", which tells the story of a low-caste worker who counterattacks with "bloody entrepreneurial spirit". It is the most popular popular novel in India today.

Netflix also adapted it into a TV series, which was similar to "Shanghai Bund" among the Chinese group in the 1980s and 1990s.

The reason why Gu Weijing understands this book so clearly is that he was in the same study group as Miss Shantanu during the school’s English Literature Inquiry class, and gave a special report on this book that won the Buke Award.

Mona Shantanu, (Mona Shantanu), is a classmate of Gu Weijing in a private international high school.

You can tell from her surname that this female classmate is quite rich.

Gu Weijing is still confused about India's extremely complex caste system after being a classmate and good friend for so long.

It is different from the general concept of Brahmin and Brahmin in high school textbooks.

Nowadays, there are actually thousands of Indian caste subdivisions.

Mona told Gu Weijing that her surname is Shantanu, which is the golden king from traditional Indian mythology. It is the same as the surname Shantanu, the famous Indian president of Adobe Company, who is now worth a market value of 100 billion US dollars.

This is a typical high caste.

Just like this golden name, Mona's father runs a gold jewelry store in Yangon and can earn a net income of about 100,000 US dollars a year, which is good anywhere in the world.

She is very beautiful and is a good friend of Gu Weijing at school.

Yangon is relatively chaotic. Gu Weijing is not yet an adult. If you want to sell some gold, the first thing that comes to mind is this female classmate who runs a jewelry store at home.

The Mumbai guy who was watching the store has obviously fully entered the plot of the counterattack of the worker, and he didn't even know that customers came to him.

Gu Weijing used his knuckles to knock on the glass plate on the counter several times.

"Oh, welcome... Master Gu."

The Mumbai guy finally came to his senses. He hurriedly hid the novel under the counter, looked up and found that it was not a customer or the boss who checked the post, and then he let out a sigh of relief.

He looked at the young man opposite him for a moment and recognized that this was a friend of a lady who had been at home several times at school.

"You are here to find Miss Mona, right?"

...

"Can you please let your employees stop calling me a young master? This makes me feel uncomfortable."

Mona's room is right behind the Golden Shop, facing the large bedroom on the first and second floors of the Irrawaddy River.

When Gu Weijing walked into the house, Mona was standing in front of the drawing board on the balcony and painting at the Irrawaddy River outside the window.

The temperature in Yangon is not cold in winter. The girl seems to have just finished taking a shower, with her wet hair hanging behind her head.

She was wearing only a bathrobe, with smooth calves exposed under the white cotton robe. The sleeves and wrists of the bathrobe were folded upwards and fixed with a pink clip.

The sunlight plated her jade-like arms with a gold powder. The three gold bracelets on her fair wrists were jingling like bells as the brushes on her wrists were jingling.

"He is our coachman and servant. Seeing the shop is just his temporary job. You are my classmate. If he doesn't call the young master, what should he call you?"

Mona asked without looking back.

India's caste system is not just as simple as the level of social wealth, but also a strong bond of clan forces.

Some social surveys say that India still has more than three million professional servants today.

Even big cities like Mumbai and Bangalore have special cheap servant hotels for them to live on business trips with their masters.

The intuitive translation of the caste of the guy who was looking at the shop is the coachman.

He was taken from the Indian countryside by Master Shantanu to a shop in Myanmar to help. His father was Master Shantanu's driver, and his grandfather was Master Shantanu's father's driver. Even his great-grandfather drove a carriage for the Shantanu family.

It can be said that the family history of this Mumbai boy over the past few hundred years is for the service history of the local country lord Shantanu family, which is solid and terrible.

Gu Weijing didn't reply. The figure of the girl painting in the sun was soft and delicate, but the slim curve exposed from the collar of the white bathrobe made him blush a little.

"Um?"

Mona hadn't heard anyone's answer for a long time, so she turned her head and happened to see Gu Weijing's somewhat shy face.

"Oh, I've never figured out what you Chinese are so shy about."

The girl turned around, put down her brush, walked out from under the balcony, and hugged Gu Weijing openly, "Welcome to my house as a guest, Boy."

"After the Chinese New Year, you have something to do. I thought we would have to wait until school starts," she said.

Mona sat cross-legged on her big pink bed, patted the seat beside her, and signaled Gu Weijing to sit down.

Gu Weijing sat next to the other party.

The girl's scent of shampoo and the faint smell of the scented candles burning in the room lingered at her nose, making her nose itchy.

He has known Miss Mona around him for a long time.

Yangon is not Paris, and there are only a few schools that offer international art classes. It is not too many choices for parents to choose from.

When he first met Mona, he was still in elementary school.

At that time, Mona was just a little girl with a vermilion auspicious mole on her eyebrows.

They went to the same elementary school, the same junior high school, and the same high school together.

Mona also changed from a young girl to a big girl.

She is the most popular girl in the school. She is beautiful but not withdrawn, cheerful but not arrogant. She is not only a member of the cheerleaders in the school, but also a female chairman in the student union. She is considered a striking figure in the school.

And Gu Weijing... I have always been Gu Weijing.

He is definitely not the kind of annoying thing in the school that is hated by gods and ghosts, nor is he the kind of weirdos and idiots who have no friends and only read books, but he is not a tall and handsome school football team fan, and he cannot dance cool breakdancing that makes girls cheer at the dance party.

He just immersed himself in his painting world and painted with peace of mind.

If you want to tell me the exact relationship between me and Mona, Gu Weijing himself may not be able to explain it clearly.

Logically speaking, girls can invite you to your room without any scruples. No matter what, this should be a very special relationship.

But Gu Weijing has been here for many years. He would discuss after-class homework together when he was in elementary school. Sometimes Mona would come to his house, and both parties would act naturally.

If you say it's just a friend or a girl's male best friend,

Both sides felt a little fond and ambiguous.

My Boy Friend - This is the word Mona often calls Gu Jing in school, and it is also the current positioning of the relationship between the two.

This word is more ambiguous than a male friend, but it is far less clear and straightforward than a Partner.

Foreign schools are more open to male and female students.

The most outrageous legend that has spread in the school is that nine years ago, a fourteen-year-old senior attended a boy scout summer camp where he went to Europe for a summer vacation. During the camping process, his youthful love made a senior Hungarian lady pregnant unexpectedly.

I heard that the woman took the initiative.

And it seems that because of family religion, the woman gave birth to the child, so she became a father at the age of fifteen.

But foreign schools are not as open as many people think.

Especially for the private local high school they attended, boys who want to sneak into girls' dormitories, girls want to sneak into boys' dormitories, and wild mandarin ducks who mess around on campus will be expelled.

Although it may not be considered a scandal, such a thing will affect the enrollment financial report. Will the school board not care?

In addition, the school is encouraging to the emotions of adolescent girls.

Regular soccer balls for boys and girls will also be held.

This is also an old tradition in private schools. What they need to learn is not only knowledge, but also life.

If you can't find a boyfriend or girlfriend throughout your entire student period, in the eyes of foreign nationals who send their children to international schools, you are just a loser and will question the school's teaching philosophy.

In Gu Weijing's school, students' definitions of friends of the opposite sex are roughly divided into the following types.

【male/lady friend】—The word means I have a friend, who is a male or female, that is, an ordinary friend of the opposite sex.

[Girl/boy friend]—This word has a little ambiguous relationship. A person can have many friends of the opposite sex.

But generally speaking, unless you play it in a special way, a boy or a girl can only have one boyfriend or girlfriend.

There are two ways to write this word in writing, one is BoyFriend and the other is Boy (space) Friend. In English culture, the former means male lovers, and the latter means male friends.

To the higher level is Partner, the meaning of this word is love.

In school, if you listen to someone introduces his lover as a partner, it means that they may not just play, and are about to get to the point where they want to live together or talk about marriage.

Perhaps because of the influence of culture, Gu Weijing felt that Miss Mona was like a erratic elf.

Sometimes he feels that the other person is very close to him, and that he can hear the heartbeat of both parties beating together. Sometimes he feels that the other person is floating far away, showing a close and distant appearance and cannot be understood.

At least when dealing with relationships between men and women, he is not as comfortable as other girls.
Chapter completed!