MEETING

It is easy to recognize the large, handsome man who is waiting for us since we’ve all explored the Relief Riders website ad nauseum. Alexander Souri is waiting in long linen Kurta Pajama shirt and a white shawl thrown dramatically over his shoulder. He guesses each of us correctly as we get off the train onto the cement platform. Alexander is the organizer and founder and creator of this whole adventure. 36, a resident of Massachusetts (and looking to buy property in Jaipur, India), born to a father of Indian descent and French mother (she was a race car driver, he did several things I can’t remember, but one of them was date Deborah Harry and perform in a band with her long before the Blondie days). Alexander is tall and stupidly handsome, and able to pull off some interesting wardrobe choices and make them look good (after a while I even begin to covet a swooping draped shawl to throw dramatically over my shoulders…but it would never work for me…sadly I’d look less like a young sheik and more like a community theatre version of Meryl Streep in The French Lieutenant’s Woman). Alexander is enigmatic and works pretty hard, at first, at creating and maintaining mystery. This is confronting to some, and annoying to others, but grows on us. He smiles knowingly instead of answering questions, nods to questions that can’t be answered by a nod. He doles out morsels of information, but rarely enough to satiate the thirst for “What will we be doing” so that we all, eventually, learn to let go. Before we can let go, we have to go through being frustrated, and Alexander, Buddha-like, just smiles as he sizes us up. It is Alexander's intention that each person have their own journey, and that it unfold for them in an individual and unforced way. To many of us, it feels like manipulation until we learn to surrender...surrendering is, of course, a skill I've never had. Simultaneously, he is fantastically funny and acerbic and dry—first to mock himself and anyone else within range. I, who can never usually get enough of being a smartass, am even occasionally taken aback when he whispers sarcastic jibes in my ear at ostensibly serious moments (at medical camps, gatherings of important mucky-mucks, etc) but being that kid in school, I quickly fall into a tit-for-tat volley of inappropriate murmured comments.