It gets worse before it gets better.
You know what I'm talking about.
To be fair, we had done an incredible amount of work to this point, regardless of how it felt. We’d completed the daunting application process for all four of our kids for the IB boarding school they would be attending, Kodaikanal International School (KIS). This 120+ years old school is located in the 7,000ft elevation hill station of Kodaikanal, a beautiful sky island in Tamil Nadu, the southern Indian state of my husband’s heritage. My husband’s grandfather, the son of two American missionaries in India, had attended the same school in the 1930’s and 40’s, as did my husband’s youngest brother, in the early 2000’s.
We’d also found a place to live. Thanks to helpful friends we’d made along the way, we were put into contact with a family who would be moving from Kodaikanal back to Singapore at the same time that we would be coming. They’d been renting a private residence that happened to be on the school’s lower grade campus called Ganga. It was perfect for us and the location was unbeatable. For those of you who like to hear numbers, the rent runs about $825 a month for this 3 bedroom, 3 bathroom, old stone bungalow.
Our boarder collie, Blue, was also coming with us. There was a tremendous amount of paperwork that needed to be filled out for his international travel. The country of India wanted a handful of things and Qatar Airlines also wanted a handful of things. We had to get special letters written in certain formats, certain vaccinations done in specific ways, a certain size kennel with specific water/food attachments and doors with locking latches. Nothing we did was without frustration and if I’d had a genie in a bottle I definitely would have used a wish to get that crap done fast. We paid a “pet liaison” about $300 to help us expedite the process and I would highly recommend it to anyone traveling internationally with pets in the cargo space.
Ravi had received his OCI card a few months before our trip. This stands for Overseas Citizen of India, and it is a perpetual visa for people of Indian origin (and those lucky enough to be married to them). The kids’ and my applications were submitted but still pending at this point. Getting an OCI card is like living the movie, Groundhog’s Day. There is so much redundancy and duplication that you begin to marvel at the inefficiency of it. Like, you know someone really put their all into making that process so repetitive and time consuming. Bravo, Sir. Bravo.
Throughout the end of April and well into May, Ravi and I had also been dealing with a real estate investment that was going downhill faster than The Man in Black being pushed by Princess Buttercup. A few months after moving to Walla Walla, we put down payments on new construction duplexes in town. They looked great on paper and after our failures on the lot in Hawai’i we were happy to invest in more of a “sure thing.” Now, I’ve only written 3 posts, but I think you guys already know what happens to Ravi and me when we make idealistic investment plans. It ended up becoming a crash and burn situation and there was nothing but a dry tinder landscape on our horizon. More on that later.
Ravi had also given his 6-month notice at work. Wait, I’m sorry. Did I write that correctly? A SIX-MONTH NOTICE? Yes, Ravi was obligated to give notice long enough for 2 seasons to change. I was sweating my butt off in pretty-short-for-a-mom shorts when he gave it and freezing my butt off in a North Face down jacket when it ended. That’s long enough for a mature rabbit to have 6 litters of babies. At 12 babies per litter, that’s a crap load of baby bunnies. Heck, in 6 months even multiple duplexes could be built from scratch! Not the ones we were desperately trying to buy, obviously, but you know, other people’s and whatnot.
Ravi began to take contract neurosurgical work in Florida to keep the mortgage paid and “food on our family.” He was also trying his hand at food blogging and started his site, PaattisKitchen. The closer we got to the end of the road, the more desperate he felt to escape.
I know that I’ve organized each of these things into neat, individual paragraphs, but they were all happening simultaneously. I don’t know if I could truly represent the crushing weight of preparing for a change this big. Like rapidly converging rivers, this point in our lives was a maelstrom of chaos with a raging whirlpool in its center, pulling us towards its event horizon where we would surely drown. We were swimming against the current and losing. The successes I wrote about above were eclipsed by the objectives that remained to be achieved. Ravi was still working, the kids still in school, the house still not ready, the cars and tractors still not sold, OCI cards still not received, and Blue’s travel permission still pending. We had 2 weeks to get on that plane, all our loose ends to be neatly tied in a square knot, and we didn’t know how it was going to happen, just that it NEEDED to.
Life is funny. In our case, this thing we wanted so badly in order to relax and reset our lives was actually creating much more tumult in it. If any of you have ever cleaned a garage, this was the point where the 20 half-empty paint cans, your old bag of returns to Target, the kids’ bucket of sand from last year’s beach trip, your broken snorkel gear, and all the seasonal clothing totes are out on the driveway. It looks like a disaster, and you want to quit. Just leave it out there and let crap blow away or get stolen while you relax on the couch eating pizza. But instead, you slowly begin to bring your items back into the safety of that unpainted drywall room. You use your practical wall storage for the paint cans and totes. You throw away the useless snorkel gear and put the Target bag in the garage-of-the-car, AKA, the trunk. You’re done, and you feel GREAT. It always looks worse before it gets better. We were there, and that’s when we got a phone call…
To be continued…