My mother’s first trip abroad

“I don’t mind learning swimming,” she said on the phone.

Later in transit I watched my mother knit her eyebrows straining to make sense of the airport announcement.

As the autowalk ushered stolid, unmoving bodies with luggage gently thumping against them we looked at a man in a hat who turned back and smiled at us.

She asked me not to smile back. “But it’s rude,” I protested.

Much later I watched in amusement as she broke her own rules to ask our cab driver, Kadak, about his divorce.

“Do you still want to swim?” I asked her the next day as we took pictures by the pool in our BnB.

This was in Bali where pools grow like puddles across villas that spring up like weeds every season.

She refused to swim but sat with her legs hanging elegantly on one side of the scooter that weaved us through skinny lanes within emerald rice fields.

I thought that was a bit like swimming. So I let it be.

Besides I can barely swim myself.

As she forced me to eat the last slice of the pizza we got free with the first pizza, I asked her if she was having fun.

“I’ve never woken up at 10 AM in my life before,” she replied.

We watched the sunset at Pura Lempuyang where two Israeli girls asked her to take their picture.

“Look to the right and smile,” she said and took their photos in four different angles.

It was much more than they’d expected and they thanked her about four times.

We ate mangosteen there for the first time.

My mother isn’t a sneakers and jeans sort of traveller but she bought herself a pair of elegant linen pants.

“I’m wearing pants after 30 years,” she said with a lot of feeling.

“No one can tell,” I said and meant it.

The pants are now neatly folded at the back of a cupboard, mothballs between their creases.

But a capiz shell wind-chime hangs outside by the roses in the garden.

Every breeze reminding her of her first trip abroad.