Late Spring

Late Spring

Today she bought Tulips for her husband.

It was sheer luck that the Ferns and Petals in the Basant Lok market had some. Tulips grow in just a couple of states of India – Himachal Pradesh and Kashmir. They cost five times as much as roses and have a limited demand compared to the more familiar jasmine and marigolds. They are almost always found in a few neighborhoods in the top cities. Usually whatever ends up in the markets are stems imported from Europe.

Any available stock was picked up by mid-morning by the love-struck teenagers who haunted the environs of the popular Cinema in Vasant Vihar, one of well to do residential localities of New Delhi.

Her husband loved Tulips. He never said that openly and used to get red with embarrassment if she asked him.

But she knew that he would smile when the flowers came up in the scenes of the Bollywood blockbuster, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge. Those scenes, with Sharukh romancing Kajol, had been shot against the backdrop of the mile long Tulip fields in Holland that lay like ribboned carpets. His face used to light up seeing them bloom in the North European countryside.

They had first seen them on their honeymoon 28 years ago and every time since then when they had visited Europe. Even when they started travelling as a family with their twin children and sometimes with their parents or friends, they had always managed to find time to see the Tulips, even if only for a few hours, nestled in between visiting the Paris Disneyland and shopping on Oxford Street in London.

It seemed unbelievable that her ‘babies’ were so grown up now that this year they would be going to the US for their graduation studies.

She parked her car outside the gate and walked to their old bungalow. She had spent more years in this house than anywhere else.

The mailbox had two thick envelopes that stuck out. Her heart quickened as she pulled them out.

One was from UPenn and the other from Columbia. They had been expecting the letters for a few days now following the email confirmations of admissions.  

She again felt a tinge of disappointment that neither of them had made it to Caltech. She would have liked to visit her friends in the Bay Area when they went over. She could almost see her husband rolling his eyes listening to her reasoning.

At least the two schools were in proximity to one another. Her sister-in-law’s family stayed in New Jersey and she taught at Princeton. When they had visited them last year, they had managed to see most of the major campuses on the East Coast.

What a year it had been, so much work they had put in. SAT tests, essays, testimonials, and interviews… it felt good to hold the result of all that hard work.

Her children greeted her as she walked in. They had been very busy ignoring her instructions to start packing and attempt to get at least one or two bags done today. She did not have in her heart to scold them. It would be nice for them to move out of Delhi and live abroad for a while. The experience would do them wonders.

She handed the Tulips to her husband who smiled. Then she gave him the letters which made it even wider.

“UPenn, Columbia. Very nice. What do they say?” he said tearing up the envelopes and running through the text. “More or less the same thing… happy to inform you’ve been accepted… joining dates… where to stay… what’s this… a map of how to get to the college…they should have sent a map of the pubs in New York instead…”

When she had proposed her idea to her husband, he had immediately warmed to it. They had been working their whole life in fields completely different from what they had learnt in engineering college – finance for her and marketing for him. Both had felt the yearning to relearn about technology. Her one concern had been their elderly parents, who had been surprisingly and had been very happy at the prospect of two more places to visit.

It would be nice to get out of Delhi for a while even though they would miss it. They had spent their lives within a few square kilometers of their house. Their closest friends, extended family, their favorite golf course, malls, were within a few minutes’ drive.

It struck her then with a ferocity not felt in a long time. Had they not decided to take this step, they would not have realized the existence of the hole in their lives, that was growing every day, swallowing the meaning of their life minute by minute. With this action, in one swoop they had ensured that both would continue to grow for the next couple of decades instead of waiting for the kids to grow up and get married and have their own kids and see them off to school.

The thought of leaving everything behind was scary but so much scarier was, what if they did not.

It was going to be a challenge and she was looking forward to it and writing an amazing new chapter of their lives. Maybe they would even start a movement… get all their friends to come over and enroll…

…to go back to school after 30 years of stepping in a classroom...to study what they had both wanted for a long time…Astronomy for her and Mechanical engineering for him…

She hoped two years from now she would look back at this moment and not recognize herself.

She hoped in a few years she would do things that would make her famous and remembered for the next ten or fifteen generations.

'Maybe I could start to work for Tesla' she thought. 'Maybe, Elon Musk would come for the interview and she could take a selfie with him.'