Yangon, India Street.

"Hello, I'd like to find Miss Shantanu."

Just like many of the historic Chinese communities around the world are called Chinatowns.

This Indian neighborhood, just west of the city on the Irrawaddy River, was already settled by Indian Sikhs with turbans following the British during the colonial era in the 19th century.

The whole street is very Indian.

In addition to hearing exotic folk songs, seeing Indian lotus lanterns drifting down the Irrawa River, and buying authentic Bombay finger curry and rotten cakes, there are also a number of gold shops here.

When Gu Weijing walked into a gold shop with Hindi देवनागरी (Heavenly City) hanging on it.

Behind the counter, the Bombay guy was holding a novel with a white tiger printed on the cover, reading it with relish.

Gu Weijing recognized this as his classmate Shantanu's favorite extracurricular book - "White Tiger".

It is India's eerie and dark version of "When Happiness Knocks on the Door", which tells the story of a low-caste migrant worker who relies on "bloody entrepreneurship" to counterattack, which is the hottest popular novel in India today.

Netflix also adapted it into a TV series, which exploded among Indians to the same extent as "Shanghai Tang" in the Chinese community in the eighties and nineties.

The reason why Gu Weijing understands this book so clearly is that he was in the same study group as Miss Shantanu in the school's English Literature Inquiry class, and gave a special report on the theme of this book, which won the Cloth Prize.

Mona Shantanu, who was Gu Weijing's classmate at a private international high school.

Just listen to her surname, you can know that this female classmate's family is quite rich.

Having been a classmate and good friend with Mona for so long, Gu Weijing is still in a fog about India's extremely complex caste system.

It is not the same as the general concepts of Brahmin and Kshadhili mentioned in high school textbooks.

Nowadays, in the case of caste subdivision in India, there are actually several thousand.

Mona told Gu Weijing that her surname is Shantanu, which is the golden king from traditional Indian mythology, and has the same root as Shantanu, the famous Indian president of Adobe with a market value of hundreds of billions of dollars.

This is typical of the higher castes.

Just like the glittering name, Mona's father runs a gold jewelry store in Yangon, and he also earns a net income of about $100,000 a year, which is good anywhere in the world.

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

Yangon is relatively chaotic, Gu Weijing is not an adult now, and if he wants to sell some gold, the first thing that comes to mind is this female classmate who runs a jewelry store at home.

The Bombay brother who watched the store had obviously fully substituted himself into the cool plot of the counterattack of the working boys, and he didn't even know that a customer came to the door.

Gu Weijing knocked on the glass plate on the counter several times with his knuckles.

"Oh, welcome light...... Young Master Gu. ”

The Bombay boy finally came to his senses, he hurriedly hid the novel under the counter, and when he looked up and found that it was not the customer or the owner of the checker, he breathed a sigh of relief.

He looked at the young man across from him for a moment, and recognized it as a friend of a young lady at school who had been to the house several times.

"You're here for Miss Mona, aren't you?"

……

"Can you ask your employees not to call me young master, it makes me uncomfortable."

Mona's room was just behind the gold shop, in a large bedroom on the second floor facing the Irrawaddy River.

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

Winter temperatures in Yangon are not cold, and the girl seems to have just finished taking a shower with her hair wet and coiled behind her head.

She wore only a bathrobe, her white cotton robe revealing her smooth calves, and the sleeves of the bathrobe were folded up at the wrists and fastened with a pink clip.

The sunlight gilded her jade arms with a gold dust, and the three gold bracelets on her white wrists jingled like bells with the movement of the paintbrush on her wrist.

"He is the coachman and servant of our family, and the shopkeeper is just his temporary job, you are my classmate, he doesn't call you young master, what do you call you?"

Mona asked in a flat tone without looking back.

The caste system in India is not just about the wealth of society, but also about the strong ties of clan power.

According to some social surveys, there are still more than 3 million professional servants in India.

Even big cities like Mumbai and Bangalore have special cheap servant hotels for them to stay in when they travel with their masters.

The caste of the shopkeeper translates intuitively as the coachman.

He was brought from the Indian countryside to help in a shop in Myanmar by Lord Shantanu, his father was Lord Shantanu's driver, his grandfather was the driver of Lord Shantanu's father, and even his great-grandfather drove a carriage for the Shantanu family for a living.

It can be said that the family history of this Bombay brother in the past few hundred years is the history of service to the local country lord, the Shantanu family, which is stable and terrifying.

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

"Huh?"

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

"Alas, I have never been able to understand you Chinese, what is there to be ashamed of."

The girl turned around, put down her paintbrush, walked out from under the balcony, and hugged Gu Weijing generously, "Welcome to my house, Boy." ”

"After the Chinese New Year, I asked you to come out to watch a movie, and you have always had something. I thought we would see each other again until school started. She said.

Mona sat cross-legged on her pink bed, patted the position next to her, and motioned for Gu Weijing to sit down.

Gu Weijing sat beside each other.

The scent of shampoo on the girl's body and the faint smell of the room's burning Bath & Body Works scented candle lingered on the tip of his nose, tickling his nose.

He had known Miss Mona for a long time.

Yangon is not Paris, and there are actually only a few schools that offer international art classes, and there are not too many choices for parents to choose from if they want their children to learn art.

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

At that time, Mona was just a little girl with a scarlet 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 little girl to a big girl.

She is the most popular kind of girl in the school, beautiful but not withdrawn, cheerful but not arrogant, not only a member of the cheerleading team in the school, but also the female president of the student union, and she is considered a popular figure in the school.

And Gu Weijing...... It's always been Gu Weijing.

He's definitely not the kind of haunting hate in school, not the weirdos and nerds who only read books without friends, but also not the tall and handsome school football team heartthrob who can't break dance the cool breakdancing that makes the girls cheer at the ball.

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

If you want to say what the exact relationship between herself and Mona is, Gu Weijing may not be very clear.

It stands to reason that girls can invite you to their own room without any scruples, and no matter what, this should be a very special relationship.

But Gu Weijing has been like this all these years, he would discuss homework together in elementary school, and Mona would sometimes come to his house, and both parties behaved naturally.

If it's just a friend, or a girl's male girlfriend,

Both sides have some good feelings and ambiguity in their hearts.

My Boy Friend - this is the word that Mona often calls Gu Weijing at school, and it is also the positioning of the current relationship between the two.

The word is more ambiguous than Male Friend, but it is far less explicit and straightforward than Partner.

Foreign schools are more open to male and female students.

The most outrageous legend circulating in the school is that nine years ago, a fourteen-year-old senior participated in a scout summer camp for a summer trip to Europe during the summer vacation.

I heard that it was the woman who 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 schools abroad are not as open as many people think.

Especially in the private local high school that Gu Weijing attended, boys who want to blend into the girls' dormitory, or girls who want to blend into the boys' dormitory, 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 admissions financial report, and the school board will not care.

In addition, the school encourages the emotions of adolescents and girls.

There are also regular sorority balls for boys and girls.

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

If you can't find a boyfriend or girlfriend throughout your student years, you will be seen as a Loser by the foreign parents who send your child to an international school, and you will question the school's teaching philosophy.

In Gu Weijing's school, the students' definition of friends of the opposite sex can be roughly divided into the following types.

[male/lady friend] – This word means that I have a friend, he/she is male or female, that is, ordinary friends 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 with special flowers, a boy or a girl can only have one boyfriend and girlfriend.

There are also two written ways to write the word, one is BoyFriend and the other is Boy (space) Friend, the former meaning male lover in English culture, and the latter meaning male friend.

The next level is Partner, which means love.

In school, if you hear someone introduce their lover as a partner, it means that they may not just be playing, they are about to get to the point where they want to live together or talk about marriage.

may be the influence of culture, Gu Weijing feels that Miss Mona is like a wandering elf.

Sometimes he feels that the other party is very close to him, and he can hear the heartbeat of both parties beating together, and sometimes he feels that the other party is floating far away, and the performance is as if he is close and unpredictable.

At least when dealing with the relationship between men and women, he shows that he is not as comfortable as other girls.