Kids - and Kerala - make holidays so special

Author Sheena Kalayil landed the coveted Writers’ Guild Award with her debut novel, The Bureau Of Second Chances, which was set in Kerala, India, her home state. She has now released her second book, The Inheritance. Shena began her writing career in Edinburgh where her husband was studying for a PHD in literature. It is a place she loves. Today, she teaches at the University of Manchester and lives in the city with her husband and daughters.

▼ Up in the hills near Munnar, Kerala, looking across the Muthirappuzhayar River.

really began for me when I was married with children. When my daughters were babies and toddlers we were financially constrained and parentally foolish. We spent a week with my ever-patient sister-in-law (and the children’s chest infections) in Devon. Then there was the weekend in Glasgow during which it rained torrentially. We sheltered in a café and my husband insisted on changing the baby because it would give him an excuse to walk past Stuart Murdoch, frontman of indie group Belle & Sebastian, who was trying to have a quiet coffee.

The baby howled and screamed at the top of her five-month lungs. I wonder if Stuart remembers us? Oh, and then there was the weekend in elegant Prague where we stayed with a wonderful friend who, unfortunately, had a large and excitable dog who terrified our three-year-old.

But one year we spent five idyllic days in Lisbon where nothing went wrong, and where we memorably spent nearly two hours sitting in the sunshine in a square while the girls, aged two and four, ran around and around a fountain, chirruping with glee.

Our luck turned – we started enjoying holidays and, serendipitously we could now afford them. Our favourite by far was taken to celebrate our joint 40th birthdays. We took the girls, then aged four and six, to Kerala to spend a month in my home state.

They paddled in the strong waves of the Arabian Sea, drank coconut water from the shell and watched the mahouts bathe the temple elephants in the great Periyar river.

They played “hangman” while cramped on the windowsill of a crowded four-hour train journey and played cricket in a tea plantation in the Western Ghats.

I watched them through that whole month with my heart in my mouth, hoping they would love Kerala as muchasido.

It was a gamble, considering our luck of old, but it worked.