A few months ago, which I considered well in advance, I thought to make some bookings for a family holiday that I knew would cause my father to have an apoplectic fit if he ever found out the price we’d be paying for bed and board — but I was counting on my children’s discretion in this regard. My parents were coming to visit at a time that coincided with my mother’s birthday that we knew to be a significant milestone, but which my sister dismissed as just “another birthday”, thus causing a certain rift between her and my wife and much insults about the necessity of hiding one’s age that flew contrary in the face of evidence. The sum of these parleys was a decision to take a clan vacation over the extended Independence Day weekend at a destination of my mother’s choice.
For some while now, my mother has expressed the hope of holidaying in Goa, and even though the monsoon is hardly ideal time to visit the beach, we decided to humour her with a junket to Goa in the rains. Though the flight prices were intimidating, we went ahead with the bookings. But it was the lack of accommodation that became a tripping point. Dismissing online reservations as baloney, I rang up the management of our chosen resort to be told that it was true, they, indeed, were fully booked up. And yes, they valued our business, but the possibility of a few rooms on this occasion was impossible.
“I’d been considering a change, anyway,” I informed my son, “there’s lots of great hotels in Goa.” Trouble with the great hotels was that they were all inexplicably booked up. I lowered my sights and cast around for cheaper fare but Goa was “all sold out”. Oh, well, if Goa didn’t want us, we had a choice of places to pick from. Kashmir would have been lovely in August, but neither a hotel nor houseboat had board to spare. Mussoorie was fully booked up; Kerala was sold out; even Agra and Jaipur had no rooms on offer. One after another, destinations fell like dominoes, and it began to look like our plan was taking a beating.
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I still held a trump card in my hands, or so I thought. Ideally, I do not like to use clout, but here was a clear case of having to count on one’s “contacts”. “I’ll call the owners,” I told my sceptical children – I knew them well enough, if not well – “they’ll manage to get us rooms in a jiffy.” I shouldn’t have been so assured as directors and managers turned down my request for rooms with or without a view. Surely travel agents would be able to find us accommodation against cancelled bookings? “Join the queue,” I was told — where we found ourselves parked, and stationary, as the days slipped by with no hope of a booking in sight.
Having finally realised we weren’t going to be able to take a break while the rest of India did, I cancelled, at considerable expense, our air bookings, reconciled to staying back. Which is why we switched on the television to rah-rah the PM’s address from the ramparts of the Red Fort, flew the tricolour on our balcony and planned ourselves a party for the evening with plenty of chilled beer — all at home. If it didn’t make up for the loss of face, or holiday, we could at least claim to have done our duty by the country and the Constitution.