Doreen and I met Moni while I was working, and Moni doing her PhD, at the International Rice Research Institute in Los Baños, Philippines, in the mid-late 2000s. I don’t remember exactly when, where or how we met, but we had many mutual friends; meeting was inevitable.
Sometimes, after people meet each other, they become friends, then – if they share enough ideas, stories, thoughts, food, debates, and laughs, and if circumstances allow it – they become good friends. Sometimes this transition can be pinned on a single moment – a joke, a smile, a night spent talking well past any reasonable bedtime. Other times, it’s a slow and steady accumulation of common ground. You realise all of a sudden that this person who was at first a colleague, or an associate of sorts, who became a friend, is now part of your inner circle.
For Doreen and me, it was the latter path. The transition happened sometime in 2008, the year in which we decided to move from the Philippines to Australia. When we made that decision, it was clearly the right one. By December, 2008 had shaped as our best year together since I arrived in the Philippines in 2003, and one of the best of our lives. Suddenly, neither Doreen nor I were quite so sure we were doing the right thing. A small group of friends were responsible for our doubt, Moni central among them.
Our memories of that year are a steady stream of days and nights filled with laughter, food, conversation and hilarity. We had forgotten how much we had loved that time until this week, when we dug up our photos from a decade ago. On a bittersweet night, nearly 16,000 kilometres from Rochester, we pored over images of Moni with us and the rest of that 2008 inner circle – her face smiling at us (always smiling), we smiling back through tears.
We saw Moni again in 2010, when we visited Los Baños from Australia. Next, on a work trip in 2013, with 36 hours in New York City on my way home, Moni made the trip down from Ithaca. Somehow we ended up at a friend of a friend’s party. Not knowing anybody else there, we sat on a balcony, overlooking some random New York street on a warm New York night, talking long into the next morning as the party ebbed and flowed around us. That was the last time Moni and I saw each other face to face. It is a wonderful memory.
This is what we think of when we think of Moni: eating together (she cooked far more meals for us than we for her); chai (she taught us how to make it properly); absurd (but hilarious to us) jokes; laughter; generosity (of food, of time, and most of all of spirit); and that famous smile (few people have one so large and warm and genuine).
We’ll miss you Moni. We’ll think of you often with smiles that, if we’re lucky, will be almost as big as yours.
Love,
Adam and Doreen