A meeting like this happens once in a lifetime. I was walking on my own in Petra, and decided to stop at one of the small huts at a panoramic point close to the monastery. Someone offered me a cup of tea, and as a trade off, I gave him a Kit Kat.

We started chatting and struck an instant friendship.

We discovered that we were born on exactly the same day - something that he even managed to verify by showing me his passport.

So here is Abed, a Bedouin who used to live in the caves of Petra until the Jordanian government relocated all the Bedouins in Petra to the Bedouin village in the mid 80s. On 11 March in the same year, he was born in one of the caves in Petra, and I was born in a town in Malaysia. Our meeting, a month before our birthday, was purely by chance. Seeing someone exactly my age, but from a different life which I can never fathom, made me realise how different my life could have been, with just one tweak in the grand scheme of things.