Skip to main content

Beach Trip

We reclaim the bruised years of the past where on a beach trip an ugly argument could have upended the vacation. The children did not know what they were meant to do. Every other family was out on the beach but in their hotel room the parents were feuding over things they did not understand. They wanted to be there by the water too - wasn't that why they were here. They were ready in their swim wear, had put on their sunscreen and had their beach toys in the tote. Today supposed to be a fun day - the sun was pleasant but not hot. They could hear the loud squeals of the children running back and forth from the waves that crashed down at the shore. They longed to be there too - make new friends, build sand castles, chase after crabs, collect sea-shells. 

Maybe their father would teach them to use the surf-board on this trip. He was always trying to teach them something new - they loved that. After an hour, he took them out to the water. Their mother said she would not go with them - it was unclear what her plans were they was eager for the beach, too eager to spend more time fretting about the conflict between their parents that never ended. Those memories can resurface by the water, at the intersection near the hotel where they lived that time, the place where they ate lunch in sullen silence. And those memories need to be washed away with new ones of two people at peace with each other. Happy to be in the water and get washed over by big waves over and over until everything left clean and new. 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha...
5 comments
Read more

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more