Remnants of a holiday…

HappY FEET...

Post-holiday blues…

It’s never easy to accept the fact that your holiday is over. Mine is. And I am still sulking about it, through security check. It’s little consolation that I get another three days extra after I land in Mumbai due to the extended weekend. Right now, I am just missing mum, dad, sis and the kids.

Meeting my parents and my sister together after so long was like going back to Delhi when we all lived together under the same roof, which was a long, long time ago. I kept reminding myself to take a picture with my parents and my sister, before I left. There were many pictures that we took but one person was always missing from the frame, usually behind the camera. And as life generally goes, I didn’t take that picture, before I left. Damn.

I’ve always felt guilty about not settling down in the same city as my parents. They live alone in Delhi, while I love Mumbai and my sister prefers to call Kerala her home. My parents had always hoped that my sister would finish her medicine and settle down in Delhi but that didn’t happen. They were still hopeful that I would return to Delhi after finishing my course in Mumbai. But I couldn’t think of letting go of Mumbai, a city I felt more connected to, in the course of a year, than I had in my 21 years in Delhi. My parents, especially my mother, couldn’t understand why I didn’t return back to Delhi, after my course got over, couldn’t understand my decision to live apart from them and its probably caused her a lot of hurt. Its probably one area of my life that I feel I failed her. I don’t regret my decision to stay on in Mumbai, I regret not being there for her and dad through those lonely years leading up to retirement and after that, to now. My parents have grand kids to occupy their time now and a new house that is being constructed, to look forward to.

I just wish I could visit them whenever I wanted, without worrying about work and Mumbai.

Planes are passe

I had to visit Palakkad’s train station the other day to pick up my parents and thats when I realised how long it had been since I set foot there, visited a train station, passed a Higginbotham store that used to be the highpoint of my train journeys back then. The sounds and smells (ok, not very pleasant, not gonna glorify that…) didnt beam me back to the past as much as make me aware of how much life had moved ahead. My parents still insisted on travelling by train, refusing to crunch their travel time from three days to three hours, they said they were comfortable this way.

I wasn’t exactly rolling in the greens when I was booking my tickets for my Kerala trip a few weeks back and given the recent upsurge in flight fares, shelling out 24 grand for a trip for two for Mumbai-Coimbatore-Mumbai seemed a tad much. We had shelled out 18 grand four months back for a trip for two that involved Mumbai, Goa, Cochin and Calicut. Yet, whatever my economic state, whatever the time of the month, I just cannot think of travelling by train anymore. Perhaps I should…