Skip to main content

Small Surprises

We took possibly the last trip to the beach for the summer the weekend past. It was plan made late Friday afternoon for the following night. The return to such spontaneity became possible only recently after a long hiatus. I had forgotten what it was like to able to take such trips on a whim. They came to be associated with a much younger age, the time of dreaming impossible dreams and seeing everything crash and burn - that was the way my life at the time turned out. But that is not to say, there was no redemption or even good things that came form the ashes for charred dreams. Just that life went in a direction I had not anticipated. Many things from that period have turned into relics that don't belong here and now. 

Interesting and unexpected experiences happened on this trip too. The sea was calm like a swimming pool and I could float on my back. The following day, it started to rain while I was in the water and I could see a school of fish riding the waves. We were all together in an infinite body of salt water, depending on who died first, one would be food for the other. Relative to the ocean we were just insignificant - the difference is one of us has to plan for retirement and the other does not. 

The Thai place we had dinner was quite extraordinary and yet it had not shown up in any reviews. One in the downtown area, I insisted on walking past the well-reviewed restaurants and to the part of town that was a bit run-down and unloved. This place was warm and welcoming run by a middle-aged couple. The food was well-balanced perfection. On the way back we were drawn to some loud music coming out of a park by the waterfront. It turned out to be a an Caribbean festival - bright, colorful and the air redolent with the smell of spices I love. The tickets were sold out but it was all open air and not hard to see the stage from out the park. We stood there with others who like us had to been able to make it in. 

The day ended with stopping at local grocery store to pick up some food for breakfast. We found some really nice coconut and guava jelly cake, yet another small bit of perfection on a trip that might have never even happened. We watched Satyajit Ray's Teen Kanya that night.

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