Back in school, on the last working day of a term after the exam for the day the corridors of the school will reverberate with the chants of “Happy Holidays” . For the rest of world “Good morning teacher” evokes a lot of nostalgia but ask anyone who has walked the hallowed grounds of Loyola school Thiruvananthapuram would definitely recollect this scene vividly. At times it may often happen that a few classes would finish their last exams in the forenoon session of the last day itself. They would immediately break into the chants and while some of us would be trying to focus on revising for the upcoming exams in the afternoon session. The feeling of enuii that we feel at that moment is incomparable to anything else in the world. The crescendo reaches its peak when the buses filled in with excited students are shouting at their top of their voices the anthem for the day. It is the final scene where the school is bidding farewell to its wards and going to miss them for the next few days. Quite often when you are going through the grind of preparing for the exams the imagery of throwing your bag on the last day of school to mark your first day of eternal bliss is played in a loop. This helps you to hang on to the roller coaster of exams that lays ahead of you.
Over the years even after school and college the holiday season is much anticipated. I recollect my first Christmas vividly in Bombay. I was not granted leaves and I had steeled myself for spending the Christmas holidays and New year away from home. At the last moment a couple of my colleagues cancelled their leaves. I saw a window of opportunity and drew first blood. But alas since it was too late, the trains were fully overbooked. I was in a dilemma since I had lobbied hard for the holidays and didn’t want to spend them alone. The journey from Bombay to Trivandrum covering a distance of 1600 odd kms via train took somewhere around 28-30 hours journey in normal circumstances. There was indeed light at the end of the tunnel and I decided to break the journey into two. One from Mumbai to Mangalore(900 kms) and another from Mangalore to Trivandrum(700). The former was to be undertaken in a bus while the latter in a train. This meant that I had to spend an additional 15 hours that the normal because you had to account for a lag associated with each journey lest you miss your connecting train. Spending 4 days just for the to and fro journey severely cut short your time that you could spend at your home but nonetheless it was totally worth it.
Another memorable holiday season would be the winter of 2013 where we made our maiden road trip from Mumbai to Trivandrum in our very own Swift . It was an eventful journey with a number of detours including one to visit my maternal aunt and her family in Bangalore another one to Madurai for my best friend’s wedding and finally to a pilgrimage to Velankanni. It was quite a wonderful feeling when you started from your flat in Mumbai and rolled into your house in Trivandrum on the 7th day. This also coincided with the decade celebrations (10 years of passing out from school) comprising of the run up to the event the formal function at school and the afterparty thereafter.
In 2020 amidst a pandemic I was grateful to have made it to the end of the year in one piece. This was the year when your personal and professional lives merged because of the fact that we had been in ‘work from home’ mode from the middle of March. So when it was time for the year end holidays it was a sense of enuii at play and nothing else. “The world doesn’t end with a bang but with a whimper’. But no, there was more to it Mindcurv, the organisation that I have been working for a good part of the last year and a half surprised us with a gift hamper delivered to our homes. There was no better sight than kiddo swooping down on it and with great aplomb unpacking each of the gifts while having a whale of a time. The grand finale couldn’t have been bigger than this I mean he deserved every bit of it. Looking through the eyes of a 3 year old how do you rationalise the fact that most of the time my father and mother are shut in a room without me for 5 days a week. After seeing the Christmas crib assembled Ethan asks me where are the laptops of the parents of the son of God kept and pensively adds that baby Jesus is very lucky he has the company of the animals when his dadda and mamma work from the manger. I feel sad on so many levels when I hear this because the pandemic also meant that he didn’t get to explore the joys of mingling with kids of his age. Come to think of it He would have atleast started play group/kindergarten if not for the times we live in.
That is curtains down to 2020.
Happy holidays!!
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