Ten Days To Departure!!!!!!!!!!

  Wow, I cannot believe it!  I am all set to go.  I have been granted a six-month multiple entry tourist visa to India, I have almost all the items on my wish list and my flight is booked!

I will fly out in ten days time, on February 2nd, JFK to Trivandrum, Kerala, via Dubai, flying back March 24^th from Calcutta.

And here again, I must thank my husband for his help and patience in finding the best flight for me; with a quick one stop in Dubai, this is virtually a direct flight with a total travel time of seventeen hours and forty-five minutes.   Believe me, compared with other flights that between stops and layovers come to a total travel time of over thirty hours, this is a breeze. 

  I haven’t packed yet though.  I don’t normally until the night before.  But I am gathering everything in my eldest son’s room (he is away at college.)  I have a top of the line Thermarest mattress that my friend Nancy bought me, she was going to give me hers but in the end she just bought me a new one.  I got myself a cute little Thermarest pillow (for my head is not used to lying on rocks as yogis can) that can be folded to half its size.  Oh, and I am really pleased with the neck pillow I got; it is not an inflatable one but it is really plush.  I hope I’ll be able to fit it into my backpack together with my tiffin box, power bars, TP*, first aid kit, collapsible bucket, clothes line and pegs, flashlight, vitamins, Delhi Belly remedy, water bottle, a change of clothes and Bruno.

  Yes, I am taking Bruno.  My son Andrew gave Bruno to me the Christmas before last.  When I unwrapped the box and I saw Bruno in it, I… I… I burst into tears.  Bruno had been Andrew’s friend since he was one year old.  This amazing, perfectly sized brown teddy bear had been my son’s faithful and loyal companion of a lifetime.  Together they had visited museums, foreign places and hospitals and always shared the same pillow at night.  But as he prepared to go to university, Andrew felt that the moment had come to pass the torch and bequeathed Bruno to me!  Maybe because Bruno is a writer, like me.

Anyway, the other night I lay in bed with Bruno next to me, when I swear he told me that he too wanted to come to India.  I was shocked and I told my husband immediately:

“Bruno wants to come India.”

“I don’t think so,” my husband said.  “He might get lost,” he added, concerned.

But now that he had put the idea out, Bruno kept going on and on about it all night.  In fact, I hardly got any sleep listening to him.

“I’ll keep you company,” he said. 

“On those nights, when your top of the line Thermarest one-inch-thick mattress and pillow won’t stop you from feeling sore and miserable, and when all you want is your husband to hold you or your children to be little again, you can hug me.  On those long ten, fifteen or twenty hour hot and sweaty bus rides when you have forgotten why you came, I will remind you.  And when you cry because you are tired, sad or hungry and desperate for something other than a Luna bar to replace the rice and curry that you don’t like, well, as Andrew can tell you, I’ll be there to comfort you - even fast with you.

And of course, we can write together about the sheer adventure of it all.”

 

By morning I had decided that I wanted Bruno to go to India with me as much as he wanted to come.  And so I called Andrew at college and asked if it was ok with him, and when he told me to go for it, I told my husband that Andrew had given his permission.

“Make sure you look after him.  It would be a tragedy if he got lost in the line of duty,” he said, sitting Bruno up in bed between us.

I then called Florentina at college, she had no problem about my taking Bruno and when Robert came home from school, I told him that Andrew had said it was ok.

“What do you think?” I asked him.

“I hope you don’t lose him and you should wash him when you come back.”

 

D’you know, I don’t think its my imagination, I haven’t seen that look on Bruno’s face since he was gallivanting around Europe with Andrew many years ago.  Or when he was writing his memoirs**.

 

Detailed itinerary will follow in the next posting, I’ll need one of the children to help me post another picture.

 

Namaste,

Esmeralda

 

*    TP = toilet paper

** “Bruno & The Search For William”