When I retired from a life that had revolved around a lot of travelling, one of the ideas that my late wife Urmeela and I seriously contemplated was to invest in a mobile home and to travel all over India. She wanted to visit many places that she had not visited but about which I had talked and also meet some of the people that she had not met. I too wanted to visit ancient temples and archaeological sites besides towns that I had not visited ever but, which were historically important.
Motor homes were not available in India and I wanted to buy a Tempo Traveller now known as Force Traveller and convert it into a mobile home so that the two of us could travel. I had even identified the garage which was capable of converting the van into a mobile home and had drawn elaborate plans on what we should carry in the van etc. There were many evenings that we spent dreaming about all these plans when Urmeela was struck down with illness which put paid to our plans.
The other idea was to live in a farm house close to a town named Ranjangaon which is about fifty kms from Pune where we live. Ranjangaon was chosen as our son is named Ranjan. In Marathi and Hindi “gaon” attached to a name meant that the village was named for either a person or a deity in that village.
I had put down the first payment to show interest in a deal for a very compact and nice farm with a small cottage in it when the same illness put paid to those plans as well. Fortunately, I was able to recover my entire down payment plus a bonus, as the seller found a buyer who was willing to pay more.
The eight years of caregiving for Urmeela also enabled us to learn to live as minimalists and we got rid of many things that we had accumulated over the years but which served no purpose in a rapidly changing world like vinyl records, cassette tapes, player/recorders, VCR and video tapes as well as CDs and CD players and so on besides many clothes and accessories. When she finally died, there was hardly any clothes left in her wardrobe to dispose off.
Recently, I too finally got rid of all my suits, jackets, ties, cufflinks, tie pins, belts, suspender belts, etc and streamlined my wardrobe so that now I find that I can get rid of one of the cupboards in the bedroom!
All these thoughts came to me after reading an article that my friend Megh sent to me about a couple who live the life that I could have lived had fate decided otherwise.
Have you had such disappointments that destroyed dreams?