The booking was done. Six tickets to Denpasar, the same villa in Seminyak we’d taken in 2023 and 2024, a driver named Wayan already WhatsApping me about airport pickup. Neha was on the sofa, phone in hand, doing the thing she does where she scrolls without expression for nine minutes and then announces a position.
“I’m not going to Bali again.”
I looked up from my laptop, where I was comparing Singapore Airlines to Garuda for the third time that morning.
“What do you mean you’re not going to Bali.”
“I mean,” she said, putting the phone down with the calm of a woman who had rehearsed this in her head for several weeks, “that I have done Bali. We have done Bali. The kids have done Bali. Mummy has done Bali. We are not going to Bali.”
“Wayan has already—”
“Wayan will live.”
In twenty-two years of marriage, Neha has redirected our holiday plans exactly twice. Once was Sri Lanka in 2019, which turned out to be correct. The other was Greece in 2014, which also turned out to be correct. Her batting average on travel decisions is, statistically, better than mine. I knew this. I was still going to argue.
“The villa is paid for.”
“Refundable till Friday.”
“The kids—”
“Aarav said, and I quote, ‘I’d rather die than go to Bali again.'”
This was true. Aarav, our seventeen-year-old, had developed the teenage capacity to find existential horror in repetition. Mira, fifteen, had simply asked if anywhere in the world had Wi-Fi and a beach her friends hadn’t already posted from. Bali, by her metric, had been ruined sometime in 2022.
“Mummy needs a bathtub. And vegetarian food. Proper vegetarian, not ‘we will remove the chicken.'”
“Mummy will be fine.”
“Mummy will not be fine. Last year she ate khichdi I made in the villa kitchen for nine days.”
This was also true. My mother-in-law, Rekha, is a Marwari vegetarian of the school that considers garlic suspect. In Bali, her engagement with the local cuisine had peaked at one grudging spoonful of nasi goreng, after which she had retreated to the kitchen and produced khichdi from supplies she had packed in her own suitcase. She had brought hing. From Jaipur. In hand luggage.
“So where,” I asked, “are we going.”
“Puglia.”
“Where?”
“Puglia. Italy. The heel.”
“Neha, we have four days.”
“Three, actually. I’ve already booked it.”
She turned the phone toward me. Masseria Torre Maizza. Six bedrooms. A pool. A cooking school. Three of the four restaurants on the property had detailed vegetarian menus, which she had screenshotted and forwarded to her mother that morning at 6:14 AM, a fact I learned later and which still impresses me.
“What about Papa?”
“There’s a courtyard. With chairs. And shade.”
“He’ll want the Financial Times.”
“They have international newspapers. I checked.”
I closed the laptop. There is a particular silence in a marriage that means you have lost, and you should accept it before you lose worse things. I accepted it.
Masseria Torre Maizza’s Naturalis Reception
We landed in Brindisi on a Tuesday. The driver who collected us was named Pino, sixty-something, and within four minutes had told me that his daughter lived in Toronto and that he did not understand why anyone would willingly live somewhere it snowed.
“Mumbai,” I said. “Doesn’t snow.”
“Bravo,” said Pino, as if I had personally arranged this.
The masseria was a former olive farm — eighteenth-century stone, whitewashed, the kind of beauty that doesn’t announce itself but accumulates. Aarav found the Wi-Fi password in under a minute. Mira found a horse. My father-in-law found a chair in the shade of a fig tree and a copy of the Financial Times, and did not move from that configuration for what I can only describe as the rest of the holiday.
Rekha-mummy was, predictably, suspicious. She inspected the kitchen the way a magistrate inspects a crime scene. She asked the chef, through Neha’s translation app, whether the pasta contained egg. He said some did, some didn’t, and would she like to come into the kitchen tomorrow and see for herself?
This was how she met Nonna Lucia.
Nonna Lucia is not the chef. Nonna Lucia is the chef’s mother. She is seventy-eight years old, four feet eleven, and arrives at the masseria three mornings a week to make orecchiette by hand because, as far as I can tell, no one has successfully told her to stop. She speaks no English. Rekha-mummy speaks no Italian. By the second morning they had developed a system involving pointing, eyebrows, and the universal grammar of two women who have fed families for fifty years and have opinions about flour.
On the fourth night, Nonna Lucia made orecchiette con cime di rapa — turnip greens, garlic, chilli, olive oil, no animal anywhere near it — and walked the plate to our table herself. She set it down in front of Rekha-mummy. She said something in Italian. Neha’s app translated it as: I made this for you. Eat.
My mother-in-law, who had not cried in front of me in the eleven years I had known her, put her napkin to her eyes and said, “Beta, tell her thank you.”
Orecchiette with turnip tops, image by OlgaBombologna, Shutterstock
Later, Neha and I were the last ones at the table. The kids had drifted off. Papa had gone to read. Mummy had gone to find Nonna in the kitchen to say goodnight, which had become a ritual. The candle between us had burned down to its last inch. Somewhere in the courtyard, someone was playing a guitar badly and beautifully.
“You were right,” I said.
“I know.”
“How did you know?”
She thought about it.
“I didn’t,” she said. “I just couldn’t go to Bali again.” ◼
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© This article was first published online in May 2026 – World Travel Magazine.
