Once upon a holiday…

As a small child, I hated summer holidays. I loved school and the thought of the summer days stretching ahead — hot, looming, unknown — was unnerving. I knew I was supposed to look forward to holidays and hate school but something about the lack of structure and the endless sunshine made me uneasy. It always felt a little wrong to be home during the day and my mother often tried to turn our summer holidays into ‘Indian culture’ training camps. But worst of all were the family vacations.

Every year, with grim determination, my parents planned our holidays. Under their steady gaze, picnics, ferry rides, and visits to amusement parks transformed into joyless excursions. This kind of merry-making was allegedly new to them. My parents took a perverse pride in bragging whenever they could about how deprived their childhood had been. They never had anything growing up, they never went anywhere. They had to make their own toys, never got to pick their own clothes. My sister and I had no idea how they had suffered. In comparison, our lives were pampered and frivolous. In consequence, our characters were insipid and unsatisfactory. Years later, when I tried to confront my fraudster parents with photographic evidence of their childhood outings to zoos and beaches, they feigned ignorance and memory loss.

My parents were part of a generation who were not yet comfortable with the idea of ‘travelling for pleasure’. They believed in travelling for weddings, for job interviews, for conferences. Thus, there was a constant need to twist our summer holidays into something useful, educational, spiritual. Every journey needed a clear destination, an even clearer purpose. Thus, we went to museums, planetariums and sites of historical importance. We burned our feet on the granite of ancient temples.

Looking back at the photographs, I can see that we all look weary. My sister and I, slouchy and resentful, look like bored hostages. My mother, a fine Indian lady who won’t smile just because you are taking a picture, looks like she can’t wait to get back to her house plants. Under no circumstances could these pictures be labelled ‘Fun Summer Holidays’. As soon as they could do so without looking too bad, my parents shrugged the responsibility of creating wholesome family vacations. Places had been visited, no children had been misplaced, photographs had been duly affixed in albums.

One for the season

As the years went by and school became more frightening, filled with integral calculus and other such beasts, I learned to look forward to the summer like everyone else. I couldn’t wait to hide away that oppressive school uniform, tie up my hair however I wanted to. I could finally put away those awful books that I had diligently underlined. I often underlined entire text books, unable to accept that any sentence could be less important than the others. Even after the holidays began, I could not relax. I would be haunted by stories of mythical over-achievers who finished the syllabus of the entire year ahead during the summer. The fear of exams past and future, settled in with a gulp of anxiety that would take years to dislodge.

Summer in a small temple town meant that you could no longer ignore the smallness of your surroundings. Nothing went unnoticed and nothing seemed to change. Underneath the heat lay a steady, restless boredom, that demon of disappointment was never far. In our little town, there really was nothing to do. We had no parks, no shopping malls, no coffee shops. We couldn’t go to movies unless someone’s brother (younger, stiff, embarrassed) could be bribed into escorting us. Television was a single-channel affair, not above displaying the time on a full screen which we all dutifully watched every day.

As summer stretched before us, we cut each other’s hair, tried to make cutlets, tried to crochet blankets. Something key seemed to be missing in all the magazine recipes we tried, things congealed and burned and would not even be consumed by ants. The crochet yarn grew yellow and sweaty under our fingers and we could no longer remember why we thought making a blanket in summer was a good idea. As the days passed, the heat would stupefy us, making us too tired to even talk.

And then inevitably, as May reached its hottest days, people disappeared. Our small town emptied out and folded into itself, becoming still and subdued under the summer sun. People slipped away quietly to the small towns that they had come from. Friends and neighbours were swallowed up by sleepy villages and sank into the houses their parents had grown up in. They came back with callused feet, haunted by memories of cousins with sadistic streaks and the smell of rice fields.

The more unlucky were dispatched in the opposite direction, to the houses of relatives who lived in bigger cities to face weeks of uninterrupted showing-off by city relations and the interminable feeling of not being good enough. Summer was a haze of being confused by traffic and staring at city girls who looked effortlessly glamorous and disdainful.

Game-changer

In spite of ourselves, we were all a little happy when school re-opened.

Most of the girls I went to school with never went to college and were either married or about to be married by the time I came home for the summer after that first dizzying year of college. I had no friends to visit, just weddings and engagements to attend. I spent that summer buying wedding gifts and being continually disappointed by the mehendi I applied on my hands and the men my friends married.

I shuffled back to college life and its exhilarations and contradictions. In the hostel I slept restlessly on a dented metal cot, stared out of windows, longed to be part of the world. Every night we were locked up while the city throbbed and lit up all around us. We tussled for bathrooms and had a single, sad phone for all 127 of us. We were always a little hungry, we could never be alone. But it was there that I found people like me, who at the end of the year, couldn’t wait to get out of the hostel but didn’t exactly want to go home either. Not quite yet.

While everyone else crammed through study holidays, we were in another world, plotting. We planned those trips with no internet, no mobile phones. We stood in line at Egmore Station, terrified of the grumpy railway clerks, exact change growing sweaty in our palms. The peculiarity of these trips and the feverishness they inspired was that everyone got caught up in the adventure. Roommates whom no one ever noticed before overheard discussions and invited themselves along for the ride. Books got pushed aside and lost as suggestions were thrown around and this idea of travel took on a life of its own.

Girls got competitive and eager to show off their hometowns, their families, their bedrooms back home. We ended up going to obscure places and visiting people we didn’t even like very much, girls we hardly knew. Before you knew what was happening, you were petting their Pomeranians and eating their mother’s cooking.

When I think back now, I realise what a pain we must have been, a gaggle of girls, all laughter and shiny hair, descending upon quiet corners of the world. Cackling loudly into the night, eating more than you thought girls could. The logistics of feeding us and picking us up and dropping us back to railway stations alone must have been a nightmare.

But I like to think that we were worth the trouble. We tried to clean up after ourselves, we were polite and largely agreeable. We were still trying on our personalities, not quite sure of who we were but growing increasingly sure of who we were not. We were detaching ourselves from our families and our pasts. It felt good to be liked for who we were in that moment and nothing more. For a very specific point in time, maybe just for that summer, we were travellers with no destination. We could go where we wanted; there was no one to tell us what to do. We were welcomed when we arrived. And nothing, not even the end of summer, could take that away from us.

Snigdha Manickavel is a Chennai-based writer

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