In the summer, we travelled with my father to the music festivals where he worked, or to the shore when he was touring abroad with bands. But winter holidays belonged to India. My mother tried to visit every year, and when she could, she took us, her children, back to the house where she grew up in Bombay, now Mumbai, the house where my grandparents still live.
Illustration: Jayachandran / Mint
Trips to India began long before we boarded a plane. They began as promises: The promise my American father made when he married my mother and she knew she would never go home again; the promises we made every time we took leave of our grandparents; the promises with which we signed our letters in careful round script and which we saw reflected in thin blue aerogrammes from Bandra; the last lines trailing up the margins in spindly prayers for our return.
One trip began before the last was finished; the days just before we flew back to the US were clouded by our departure, by the months or years before we would see my mother’s family again. My grandfather began to marvel ruefully at how quickly we grew and how changed we would be the next time he saw us.
Usually, he watched us playing from a short distance but, on our last day, he caught us in fierce hugs. At the airport, my grandmother kissed the top of my head without releasing my mother’s hand. By the time I was 10, their distress became part of my own and I wished we could promise more than to come back soon; I wished we could promise never to leave, never to change.
In the years when we were going to India, the whole calendar seemed to tip in that direction. We knew months in advance, sliding through seasons until my father retrieved the battered suitcases from the top shelves of closets and my mother began to fill them. I remember the care with which my mother packed, the strong sense that every available space must be used.
We were trafficking in whatever was rare and precious or difficult for our family to find, from our own school pictures to electronics, from the sort of nightgown my grandmother favoured to the peanut butter we American children liked to eat, even on our chapattis. Once, I carried a banjo, its case already covered in stickers, so that my uncle, an accomplished guitarist, could try playing a new instrument.
When my father used to go on the road with musicians for long tours, my mother brought my sister and me, little more than babies, to India on her own. But, the year I was 10, we all travelled together. My parents must have dreaded the flights, but I loved them, savouring the days ahead. My sister and I had small bags of our own, packed with books and toys for the flight. I remember opening my brand new Hello Kitty travel diary, imagining all the words that would fill its pages.