The summer leaves twice

I had this wrong for years, and it took a calendar to show me.

I used to write the Gulf summer into a plan with a single trigger: Eid al-Adha. The Eid week emptied the cities, so June went, July and August went, and the plan came back to life in September. It described what happened accurately enough that I never questioned the mechanism underneath it.

This year Eid al-Adha is expected around the twenty-seventh of this month, depending on the sighting, with Hajj in the last week. The school year is still running after it.

So the two events have come apart, and I can finally see which one was doing the work. Families travel for the Eid week, and then they come back. There are school days left. There are exams left, uniforms still needed, a return flight booked around a term that has not finished. The city empties, refills, and then empties properly a few weeks later, when the last bell goes and the long departure begins.

Eid was never the cause. For most of the years I have planned against, it landed near the end of term or just after it, and I read two events arriving together as one event with one trigger.

The trigger is the school gate. It always was. Eid is a week away, not a season.

Which means a plan that writes June off on the strength of the Eid exodus is writing off a month the customer is still here for: hot, bored, at home, with the flight already paid for and weeks to fill before it.