EXHAUSTED after having written the synopsis of a three act play, getting a top Mumbai theatre personality interested in another, meeting a producer for my film script, and finishing the teaching of my online classes, my creative mind was now a total blank.
If you’ve heard of the phrase, and not the dish, ‘bheja fry’ I would say, that’s how my brain was; fried!
And then the family mentioned a ‘staycation’!
It’s a new term, one that’s sprung from lockdown days, when one needed to get away from the jail that home had become.
But like all phrases, this has come to stay, and when they mentioned the, JW Marriot, and a room overlooking the sea, I jumped at the idea, into the car, to the hotel, into the room and into the arms of luxury!
Two days of staring at the sea, wild, choppy, and with a continuous roar that spoke of an awesome Creator got my mind settled, and calm.
We walked on the beach, my wife and I, and memories flooded our minds, not of the beautiful hotel behind but of the same beach where we sat in our courting days and built dreams even as we dreamt our future life together.
There was a prayer in our minds, and even as we watched the twins jumping in and out of the swimming pool and our daughters nearby, it was a prayer of thanksgiving!
Sitting at the window of my room and watching the sea, my mind went back to an old Fargo bus that took my brother and I to school.
It huffed and puffed and many a time I wondered whether it would breakdown on the way, but as it passed Egmore station there seemed a change in the bus’s attitude and though I knew what was outside, I still had to look.
It was an old church with bold letters carved on its steeple, ‘come ye apart and rest awhile’.
It seemed my old Fargo bus saw those words every time it paused at the bus stop outside the church, because after that, the engine with renewed zeal took us to school on time!
My mind raced back to the hotel room.
I realized what I was doing was what Jesus had said to his weary disciples when they had come back to Him after an exhausting period of preaching and healing, “Come ye apart and rest awhile!
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And through His creation, the sea, He whispered the same words to me, and to each of you who is weary and tired, to leave everything for awhile and go to Him, to be refreshed and rejuvenated, and like that old Fargo bus of my childhood, ride into the next day and the next with renewed energy.
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