I like how excited u are about coming home. 🙌, said a friend on FB.
Her comment is understandable given that one has returned from what seemed like on social media, and indeed was, an amazing holiday. The break one truly needed. Most don’t have the good fortune to get it and I feel truly blessed.
What’s funny was that I did not even realise how much I needed to go away. Two years of staying at home, large parts of it literally, could have gone either of two ways. It could have driven one mad. Or one could have made peace with it. It was the latter in my case. I was happy with K at home and our two boys. A year of working from home before the pandemic had prepared me for it. We did go on a few in city hotel staycations and then to visit family in Kolkata and Delhi. Once to Goa. All very short trips. In protected environments.
As the days went by, I figured out how to do most of my work from home. ‘You have become a cat’, said K once. She did not mean it as a compliment! I was living up to the cliche’d notion of a writer being one who stays at home, preferring the company of his/ her cat to that of people. Even thought at times, all I was ‘writing’ were Instagram posts.
I had enough and more reasons, I thought, to claim ‘injury time’ when things began to open up. Covid, herpes etc etc.
Who will look after the boys? They will miss us if we go. I am comfortable at home. What’s the hurry to travel.
Till the missus figuratively caught me by the ear and shook me to my senses and ensured that we went on a holiday.
I like to tease her about the ‘2.25’ days that I enjoyed as a #solotrip before she joined me.
She retorts and says, ‘had I not reached, you would not have moved out of the lane in which the hotel was.’
Yes, our notions of travel don’t match to a T but we do love to travel. K knew this and worked really hard to make it happen.
I had forgotten how much I liked to travel. The fact that my back pain disappeared the moment I stepped out to a mall to shop the day I flew out tells me that my muscle memory hadn’t forgotten this.
What’s the moral? I don’t know. Apart from the obvious one of ‘listen to your wife?’
Don’t close yourself to the world, perhaps?
