The Last Chair and Six Minutes Over Luxor

The last chair was filled at twenty past two. My nephew came straight from the airport, still creased from a night flight out of Kuala Lumpur, and lunch had been called for one. Nobody minded. In winter, the family table in Jaipur moves out to the verandah. By early afternoon the sun comes through the stone jaali in small bright coins that drift across the cloth as the hour turns. By the time he sat down, they had reached the dal.

There were fourteen of us, from three countries and two time zones. My mother sat at the head of the table, counting heads under her breath the way she always has, as though the number might change if she looked away.

It had taken eleven months to arrange. The food took a morning.

I have thought about that ratio more than I expected to.

Most of what makes a journey can be arranged, and you will know this better than most. The villa can be held. The chef can be persuaded to cook on his day off. A dining room can be opened on the one night it is meant to be dark. The harder part is getting fourteen diaries to open to the same week. A daughter’s exams will not move, and neither will a son-in-law’s board meeting. A surgeon in Singapore remains unconvinced that his patients will survive a Thursday without him.

And the moon keeps its own appointments.

This is why I have come to think of alignment as the rarest thing a journey can hold. Everything else can be bought. Alignment comes with a date, and the date belongs to nobody.

The year ahead is unusually generous with them.

On Monday 2 August 2027, the moon will slide exactly across the face of the sun. Over Luxor, a little after one in the afternoon, the day will go dark for more than six minutes, a longer totality than anyone on easily reached land will see again this century. Three bodies will keep an appointment set long before the first stone of Karnak was laid, and they will keep it to the second.

Münster runs on a slower clock. From 13 June to 3 October, the city will fill its streets, parks and courtyards with sculpture, as it has once a decade since 1977. Miss it and the next chance is 2037. By then you are ten years older, and so is everyone you meant to bring.

Closer to home, spring compresses. Lunar New Year, Holi and Easter fall within a little over seven weeks of one another. For many of us, the question becomes less where to go than how many tables there are to fill, and in which order.

The families I know in Mumbai and Penang, in Delhi and Singapore, have understood this for a long time. They plan the way my mother planned that lunch. The guest list comes first, the date second, the destination a distant third. From outside, it can look like caution. The group is large and spans many generations. The eldest must be comfortable, and the youngest must be fed by seven.

I have come to see it as the most sophisticated instinct in travel. Anyone with means can reach a remarkable place. Arriving there with the right people, in the one week that will not come again, is the harder thing and the rarer one. It is what this issue of World Travel Magazine is built around.

You will find it at an Easter table in Puglia set for three generations. You will find it beneath the eclipse, at a private viewing in Upper Egypt, where a small group will stand very still while the light thins, the air cools and the birds, briefly, stop.

What stays with me from that afternoon in Jaipur is a single movement. When the door opened and my nephew walked in, fourteen heads lifted at once. Nobody arranged it. The whole table simply looked up.

I suspect 2 August will feel much the same, on a larger scale.

My mother has already asked what we are all doing that week. ◼

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© This article was first published in Nov-Dec-Jan 2027 edition of World Travel Magazine.