LOVE & TRAVEL - DEPARTURES

Chef Manu Chandra looks back on a time that brought home the power of love and travel

- Manu Chandra

In the toughest of times, as my mother often said, love and kindness don't beg to be repaid. In her younger days, Ma was a successful entrepreneur, running a furnishings export business together with my father. She was an avid traveller-even flew the Concorde! Ma would come back with stories from around the world-of the mock duck fashioned out of eggplants in Shanghai, of meeting the Beefeaters with their ravens at Tower Bridge, of Pakistani cab drivers in Manhattan who sang KL Saigal songs, of being mobbed in Mexico City for her exquisite Kanjeevaram saree...

As for me, I've never been a fan of domestic air travel. The chore of a short journey weighs heavily in the cacophony of busy skies, busier airports, and Bengaluru's capricious traffic. This burden weighed heavier given my working hours, invariably late, and a flight, invariably early, where I was shuffled into a waiting aircraft, invariably delayed. A day once promising now squandered in transit.

In 2019, a full year before the pandemic, I started finding solace in this drudgery of travel. Collapsing into my usual exit seat on UK810 filled me with equal measure of longing and hope, a desperate bid to arrive before the IV dripped its somewhat uncertain life-saving doses into my mother's veins.