For the last time

Dear Bean,

You began new school day before yesterday. To put this in perspective, you are three years old and this is the third school in as many months. We moved to Gurgaon for the Brat to begin new school. They didn’t have a seat for you. We waited a couple of weeks hoping that a vacancy would come up and  finally put you into a playschool because you were dying of boredom. And as luck would have it, within a month of us doing that, a seat opened up for you. Just as we’d relaxed and figured we don’t need to put aside more money! (Your father and I have figured that we might never want for anything, but life will never leave us money for jam.)

Anyway, we have been preparing you for this for days, telling you that soon you’d be a big girl and go to big school with the Brat. And so when the day dawned bright and clear we marched in there thinking you’d happily march off as always. But I think  you’d had enough of being shoved from school to school. Because although you wandered in hesitantly, you kept coming back to check on us. It didn’t help that you saw your brother’s class practising for a Janmashtami show (did I mention my little Gopala looked beyond handsome in his orange silk kurta?)  and wanted to run to him. Thirty minutes of you doing back and forth and I began to blame myself for messing up my easy going children with the constant moving.

And so I settled down, expecting to spend the day sitting out in the heat with not even a book to entertain myself. And then suddenly your teacher called and told me that you were happy and busy sharing your tiffin with some other children. And that I could leave if I wanted to. And I did. And it’s done. You’re now in a big school with your brother. Everything we set out to do in  moving to Gurgaon, is done. I can for now, only hope that the school will be all that we hoped it would and that you both flourish in it. You’re a hardy little weed who within minutes settles in. And while I often worry about your brother, I notice that he seems to shrug off insults and happily make friends. In his own way, he’s a sturdy little good heart too. You are confident and he is easy going and between the two of you, you already have hoards of friends in the complex.

And so it is that I shut one chapter on this book. You’re in big school. I am the mother of two school going children. Ancient! Bless you, baby, babies.

A very teary

Ma.

PS: As a friend on the phone remarked – I am sounding very unsettled and unlike myself. You are both in school, loving the complex, your father who is the boss of himself has shifted his office space to Gurgaon. I am the only unwell idiot, killing myself softly with my looooong commute.

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