MEMOIR
Today is a day of love and longing. Love for the place I’m in, and longing for the home I left behind. A home, in a city I could not travel back to lest I carry a virus no one wants. All of this summer, I’ve spent time traveling, in isolation. In a little village in Goa. I’ve travelled far and wide. Through the sunlit windows of the house – I traversed the length and breadth of the hills surrounding my childhood home in Assam. The road I passed through every day then, I walk again now, flanked by Amaltas drooping happily over the passersby. Those days are these days, when all I want to do is jump up and see how it felt like to hang alongside them.
In Goa, the trees look at you like your mother would. With them, I retrace my steps to peripatetic days in Delhi, when many winter afternoons were spent reading under giant, shady trees. The sky today, more grey than blue, brings comfort as it reconnects me to sunny mornings of my forbidden home. The Goan sea, the sound of which is my wake-up call every morning is a sliding door to that home by the sea. In Abu Dhabi.
As I travel, I carry my home with me, day to day, moment to moment. These moments take me back to those places in the city where words not spoken were heard. Where loss was replaced with hope. Where questions I asked found the answers.
When will I be home again? What will I miss about here when I return? The mornings in the garden. The smell of Champa. And oh yes, the rain!
Today, as I write this, I also ask, where is home? Is it a tangible place? Or is it the nurturing I found in the wilderness of Goa I call home? Is home Bombay (Mumbai), where I used to be once? Of what exists now is the certainty of coming back to family. Or is home those places in the city I adopted? Where I found myself wrapped by the unfathomable warmth of the sun and boundless love of the sea.
Deyscriptions 