A Frown Turned Upside Down.

I went with a frown, I came with it upside down.§

Today, in a turn of events, our school let us do something fun. We went to a botanical garden in Sinhore. Harji-Van botanical garden.

Since tomorrow is my birthday and I wasn't going to school tomorrow, I got special permission to wear my own clothes today, which turned out to be the greatest decision of my life. Quechua trail-running pants, a black polo shirt and wayfarer sunglasses.

We left at 9. Lots and lots of technical difficulties and indecision about how many buses to take delayed us by a decent 30 minutes. Eventually we left and I was sitting alone. I was on a bus with my class, 9th science. I have no friends in this class. Either all of them have very rigid criteria for friendship, or I'm just an outsider. I sat alone in the front seat not talking to anyone for a hefty one and a half hours.

When we eventually arrived, I got off the bus first to stretch, where I was greeted by the yelling of "Sopari!" which has been a nickname I have had to live with because of my "unique" American accent.

We reached the main lobby area or the communal meeting area, which is one of the most developed areas in the ~100-acre expanse of land.

I started talking with some people, but they barely reciprocated the effort that I put into initiating the conversation. This demotivated me, and eventually made me quiet and roam by myself.

The owner of the land gave us a "brief" one-hour introduction about who he was, and what he had put into making this botanical garden from scratch. After concluding his monologue, we were excused for 10 minutes before we were taken for a "Nature Hike". Applying the teachings of a person I met on the Nanda Devi expedition I went on in May, I started talking to our guide, I knew I had put those lessons to good use when I made our guide blush and laugh.

Just a mere 2 minutes into our hike, I found a peacock feather. Having "smuggled" at least 20 peacock feathers from our local park, I shamelessly asked our guide if I could take the feather, to which he said yes.

I spared no feather in sight. I collected every single feather in sight. Half feathers, peahen feathers, small feathers, big feathers. In the end, I was left with 30 feathers. I gave away almost all of them, which made people happy and, in turn, made me feel proud.

We continued hiking for a good 2 km. On the way up, I ran the entire trail, staying at least 200 metres ahead of our guide. I was joined by a few of the kids who call me "sopari" in the very front. This is the turning point of my entire trip.

We were ahead of every single person, and this is what brought us together. They started talking about how WE were ahead of everyone. Not they, but WE.

Looking at my five collected peacock feathers, they asked how I found all of them. I explained to them where and how I found all the feathers. They became so obsessed with collecting feathers that they forced me to run with them ahead of everyone who came with us so that we could be the first to collect peacock feathers.

While we were running, we noticed that our feet felt like they were burning. When we looked down at our shoes, we saw that they were covered with those spiny seeds that hook onto you so that they can be dispersed far away. Along with those seeds, there were at least 20 spines jutting out of our shoes. When we pulled them out, they appeared to be only 2–3 mm long. They were also mildly blunt. We could not figure out what was causing our feet to feel like they were on fire until we saw that everyone was experiencing the same thing as us.

We pulled off our socks and saw those tiny, needle-like thorns jutting into our skin.

Apparently, we'd unlocked the wrath of a thousand fire ants.

Regardless, we pushed on and continued, and in the end, during our hike, we collected 20 feathers. Along the way, I found two halves of a dog or a similar animal's skull. It was very disturbing considering that the canine teeth of the animal appeared to be fused to the main jaw. I picked it up with two fingers and held it away from me and then proceeded to chuck the skull a good 50 meters out into the valley. The other half of the skull had different plans. I pointed that part out to a friend, and the friend took the skull, held it up like it was the skull of Zeus, and chased girls around with it...

When we reached our main communal area, we all fell down, took off our socks, and spent a good 10 minutes trying to get all the thorns out from our shoes.

Then came lunch, which may perhaps be one of the best parts of the day.

I reunited with my old friends, from whom I had been separated when we entered ninth grade due to the stream selection.

All the kids who called me "sopari" were in the other class. They were on great terms with me now, and I became a member of their group. No one batted an eye. I just went to them, sat down, and they all acted as if they had known me for years.

Midway through lunch, people were getting restless and were too lazy to get up to refill their food, so I volunteered to get it for them.

I received an order for five gulab jamuns, eight cutlets, and seven glasses of buttermilk. Remembering the teachings from the Nanda Devi expedition, I became shameless and went and grabbed a full plate and filled it up with everything everyone needed. While returning to my group, I was applauded and whooped at by everyone for having no sense of shame and just doing it.

I then proceeded to donate the next 20 minutes of my life to "samaj-seva" while remembering the words of my grandpapa, which roughly translate into English as:

The best way to win people is to give them an unforgettable experience. Feed them.

I was transporting trays of buttermilk to everyone in my group and also doing the occasional "friend serving" too.

By the end of lunch service, our group of ~12 people had finished 70 glasses of buttermilk. The funny thing is that no one believed us, but we had the receipt to prove it, except that the receipt was just 70 empty glasses of buttermilk stacked into a long tower...

After everyone had finished eating, I stayed behind for a couple of minutes to help clean up everyone's used paper napkins, plates, mouth-freshener packet wrappers, and the occasional drool-covered spoon...

With lunch out of the way, we proceeded to go to the nursery, where there were rows of hundreds of well-manicured plants. There were also some bonsais whose growth was being redirected by the use of wires. This sight was a first for me, and it left me utterly amazed because I had only seen bonsais in Cobra Kai season 1 and nowhere else.

In the nursery, we were given the opportunity to plant some jade plants or, as the owner called them, "Z plants."

While we were planting the juvenile plants in soil mixed with perlite, one "brilliant" student had the idea of asking a man who was watering the plants to spray some water near him so that he could wash his hands.

All the kids who saw this got the brilliant idea of jumping into the stream of water to get wet—and get wet they did. Everyone got wet, including me. My amazing pants were drenched.

It did not matter because they were quick-drying, and getting soaked actually felt immensely refreshing after spending seven hours in the scorching sun.

We then moved to another part of the nursery, where my friend held a Champa flower to my nose. Not expecting any pollen or anything else to be on the flower, I stupidly took a deep breath through my nose, which turned out to be a rather bad decision. I then proceeded to let out five rapid sneezes, which sounded like Hiroshima...

After leaving the nursery, the entire group headed to a little maze.

It was not little.

My long-lost friends and I took a route. We took three connecting turns. We got lost. But when we thought all hope was lost and we would need a Mil Mi-26 (the most overkill rescue helicopter) to come and rescue us, we took five steps and exited the maze.

While we were in the maze, my friends were pushing me, and they were treating me like a car, controlling my movements. Towards the end, my friend was "driving" me, and we were faced with a minor "obstruction".

The obstruction was a four-foot-eleven-inch girl. The girl was stubborn and refused to move out of our path. Hearing this, my friend pushed me, ramming me into the girl and causing her to fall...

We then proceeded to laugh for a solid 10 minutes.

We returned to the communal ground, where the group and I just sat and cracked open packets of chips, popcorn, two Diet Pepsis, and even more packets of chips.

We just sat there, talking about random things for a solid hour before we stood up, wandered about, went and talked with the owner, chased down one of our friends like we were on a manhunt, and climbed a treehouse whose structural integrity was questionable.

We boarded our bus back to school at 5 p.m. and arrived at 6:20 p.m.

On the bus back home, there was one song playing in my head: "Lush Life" by Zara Larsson. I then began to think about my entire day. Not the lunch service, the trek, or the garden, but how lucky I was.

I had been away from my old friends for half a year, barely talking to them for more than 10 minutes a month, and yet here I was, being forced to take the same bus as them and sit with them so that we could all enjoy the trip together.

In all of this, I didn't feel like a stranger with them. I felt at home.

And the funny thing is, it hadn't started that way at all. That morning, I had sat alone on a bus full of people, wondering whether I was simply an outsider. I had spent the first part of the trip trying to make conversation with people who barely reciprocated. Then, somewhere along a trail, a bunch of kids who called me "Sopari" started running with me. Suddenly, it wasn't about who was ahead anymore. It was about how WE were ahead.

Somewhere between the peacock feathers, the thousand fire ants, the questionable skull of a deceased animal, seventy glasses of buttermilk, and whatever on earth happened in that maze, I stopped feeling like an outsider. Nobody announced that I was part of the group. Nobody held a ceremony to welcome me. I just found myself there, laughing with people who, a few hours earlier, I barely knew how to talk to.

When my friends called me their "brother," even though I wasn't related to them, it made me realize that no matter the distance between friends, no matter how much time they have spent apart or how many fights they have had with each other, at the end of the day, they'll treat you as one of their own and not as a stranger.

Maybe that's the meaning of friendship. Maybe it's just as simple as remembering and not forgetting. Maybe it's not about talking every day, or constantly being around each other, or even knowing what is happening in one another's lives. Maybe it's about being able to sit down after months apart and pick up where you left off, as if the distance had never really mattered.

Maybe it's also yelling at the bus driver to speed up and overtake the other buses so that we could arrive first, promising him packets of Vimal, packets of Mava, and packs of desi alcohol as a reward. Who knows? Friendship is a strange thing.

I guess we'll never know exactly what makes it work. All I know is that Vihaan Vaghela had one of the best pre-birthday trips with his friends.

That morning, I went on the trip expecting another day of being the odd one out. By the time I came back, I had a bus full of memories, a head full of laughter, and a song that I couldn't get out of my mind.

Maybe that is what made it special. Nothing extraordinary happened. We went on a hike, ate lunch, got soaked, got lost in a maze, and did a dozen other ridiculous things. But somewhere in all that ordinary chaos, I found something I hadn't realised I was missing.

And as the bus carried us home, with "Lush Life" playing somewhere in my head, I realised that sometimes, the best days aren't the ones you plan to remember. They're the ones that make you realise, on the way back, just how much they meant to you.

In this case, we lived our Lush Life.

-Vihaan Vaghela.