Summer of 2016

I returned from Trivandrum after yet another summer break.  It was not quite what we had hoped it would be. 

I was taking a long break in my in-law’s place perhaps for the first time since my marriage in 1989.  I was hoping to spend a lot of time reading while Lakshmi was to keep the boys busy with tennis and whatever else.  And in the midst of our respective schedules we hoped to find some time to engage in acts of togetherness.  In short, we were hoping that it would be the perfect picture of the hard working family of an academic trying to balance work and family life.

Within a week it turned out to be quite the opposite. With my sis in law taking worryingly ill we were scrambling for tickets in the middle of the night and then waking up the boys in the wee hours of the morning to board a flight to Bangalore, all groggy eyed. 

It must have appeared rather dramatic to the ten year old twins.  Just the previous night they must have gone to bed thinking of all the strokes that they had missed in their evening cricket and working out how to get it better the next evening.  And then here they were, being huddled into a taxi to the airport, not even knowing what time of the night it was.

Uncertain days rolled by as sis in law recovered by God’s Grace after much worry and prayer.  The boys looked forward anxiously to resume their vacation with every positive word of the recovery until it was time to book the tickets back to Trivandrum.

But then Destiny thought otherwise. An elderly relative of ours, a close one, departed from this world.  And we had to play our polite social and family part, putting off the return even further.

By the time we finally boarded a plane was back it was more to retrieve the luggage that we had left behind as we quit Trivandrum in a hurry and pay a few quick customary annual visit to our favourite deities in Trivandrum.

And with that went our plans for tennis lessons, my reading and the bonding trips that we had planned. 

The vacation was a far cry from the hectic socialization of the previous year that culminated in the wedding of someone I had decided was going to be the daughter that wasn’t born to Lakshmi and myself.  A summer in which I pined as much as I hoped, enjoyed and lost.

Two months later, the sense of disappointment that saddened us has worn off.  The boys are back in school, dealing with the hurly burly of school and academics.  The vacation that wasn’t is perhaps behind them.  Children are great and natural practitioners of living in the present.  Lakshmi is busy helping them deal with the torturous, humdrum and drudgery that school is these days.  My sabbatical is off to a start that none of us would have imagined as we all as a family are learning to deal with what appears to be a new curved ball that life has thrown at us.

Nanni…..Namaskaaram…