The unbearable lightness of let-down

As we struggle through nearly two months of intense summer before the monsoon arrives in right earnest and brings relief, an undercurrent of excitement is running through the family - hugely underplayed, totally unstated, but real nevertheless. No, we are not daft, getting excited over days of unalloyed heat and sweat. We are looking forward to meeting as a family again.

The whole thing will be bounded by many limiting factors. The daughter will be home for a good two months - as long as Delhi University shuts down in summer. She has said she is coming primarily to rest and recover from the terrible strain of semester exams and the rigours of helping run their three-girl hostel. Rest means being mainly locked up in her room and running up an astronomical bill on the wife's cell phone talking to friends. The son will be home only for a week or so and has made it clear that he will not have any time to visit relatives, leaving it to us (the wife and I) to answer relatives who will aver that we didn't bring them up right.

But still we, the elders, are elaborately planning to make the best use of the few days. A day's outing at a nearby resort will have to be meticulously structured. The high-water mark will be visits to a couple of carefully chosen specialty restaurants that are currently riding on popular acclaim. And maybe an evening at the club for the children to check out if the steak is as good as it used to be.

In all this the one point not mentioned and, on the face of it, totally ignored is disappointments. But I know that both the wife and I are also carefully planning for contingencies. I am sure we will take in our stride a particularly important evening being washed out by rain. And I do hope no one falls ill. When the children were younger, they hid a tummy upset so as not to miss out on a treat. For myself, I will be extra careful and not do something silly as I have just done - laid myself up for a couple of days after carelessly spraining my back.

All this will be somehow manageable, but what will be really disappointing is the visit of one or the other of the children getting severely truncated or worse. And no sooner had I firmly brushed aside the inauspicious thought than the wife returned home with a steady expression on her face and asked me if the daughter had called.

She hadn't, so the wife herself gave me the news. The daughter had informed her that she had at last located some organisation that was willing to pay a summer intern, and if she made the selection, most of her summer holiday would go in trudging the dusty streets of rural Haryana and plotting the state of gender equality for a well-known non-governmental organisation.

Before I could say a word, the wife declared firmly: Haryana is too unsafe for a young girl to move around such a lot and that too in this weather. I tried to say that she had not got the assignment yet, but was firmly brushed aside. My further attempt to point out that we didn't know if she would be part of a foot-slogging team was dismissed equally out of hand. The wife had imagined the worst and, to be truthful, over the decades her uncanny instincts had turned out right more often than my rational expectations.

After a while I realised that we two were deliberately arguing over what was really less important. Beneath the noise was the unstated real issue - the disappointment that would follow if a two-month holiday of a child was truncated into a week's hurricane tour. I sought to firmly take control of myself and began to redo plans in my mind so as to be happy with whatever we got.

But I couldn't help but remember a sentence recently uttered by the wife of a close friend. They were leaving a do early, since they had to go to the airport to pick up their daughter (married and naturally with a life of her own), whose flight back had been delayed. I said: not a problem, send your car and driver and I will drop you two as we will all be going home the same way. Then the friend's wife said quietly: we would rather leave early; don't want to miss out on a chance like this (the return journey from the airport to the daughter's place) to spend a bit of time with her.

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