My Experiments with Time

The alarm sounded unusually at 3.45 on Monday morning; and as usual I continued sleeping while my over-anxious husband woke up just to make sure I was out of bed. I managed to lazily creep out of bed at 4 am, obviously cursing for the nth time the mastermind behind the early morning plan.  For the first time in my life, I was in my kitchen even before dawn making idli-chutney as we didn’t expect to find any good hotels enroute the Oman-Dubai border. Making idli had never been such a mammoth task. Like a bird in the wall clock, my husband kept reminding me that we would be late if I didn’t rush. We had promised to join our friend and family at their place at 5 am, and I knew right away that it was mission impossible. We finally managed to push through and reached our car at 5.10, only to find that we had missed one precious bag that contained the passport and resident cards. My superstitious husband was annoyed at having to return when we were about to go on a long journey; and ap...

After almost a month of repetitive packing, travelling and unpacking, I have finally settled in my new abode. Now that it’s been a week of staring at the ceiling and appreciating the craftsmanship of the person who designed the lights and door handles in my flat, I ponder over the many things that happened during the past two months. As I have anyway decided to run a flash back, let me go deeper into the whirls of flashback like in old Indian movies!……. It’s November of 2009 and my wedding has been fixed to ‘the NRI from Dubai’. Till then Dubai was just another country in the ‘Gelf’ that I get to hear a lot on my vacations to Kerala. As a kid I had always thought that as a rule, at least one person in each Malayali family had to be in ‘Gelf’. Suddenly Dubai became the most important word in my life with anyone and everyone I came across talking only about Dubai. From the aunty next door to the CEO of Saint Gobain, everyone had their comments to offer on Dubai. ‘How do you feel abo...