Heading Homeward

In less than twenty days, I will be making my first trip home in two years. Amidst, the clamor of joy and bittersweet excitement, I can’t but wait to feel the anxiously relieved smiles on appa and amma, glad to be waiting for their prized possession to come home. I am yet again reminded of how life teaches you to realize its worth when you do not have it.

I had been spending the past few days typing mails to friends and making an active presence in the group mails; making an earnest effort to catch up. It felt a lot different from the dolorous letters, mussed with ‘miss you’ on every second line, that we used to share as sixteen year olds. Standing many years away from class-parties and doleful farewells, each living in a different corner, a different world, somehow common grounds is always met with old stories remembered and guffawed.

At such moments, I uncannily realize the ghosts hidden in each of us, which surface to bring a timely smile, a momentary goose bum, a gush of nostalgia and a fleeting lump for that tiny tear. Yet, it passes, just like a hazy cloud, leaving you high and dry to return back to life around you, until another time.

One of my first instances of yearning for home was amidst rigorous goolging to complete assignments. I chanced upon the India map, out of an irking pop-up; and somehow, I have never been able to repeat that instantaneous jerk of patriotism and inexplicable pining to head home, the picture brought to me. Given, another minute of that rush of adrenalin, I am sure, I would have taken the next flight to Madras.

I knew that the inkling never died, and resurfaced as the easy sobs upon watching the award winning ad on you-tube yesterday, recommended by hiten . And yet, away from the two seconds of thoughts to give my best to my home country, return to people who love me, here I am fulfilling my responsibilities for the company that keeps my experience and moolah intact.

How is it, I muse, that we live selfishly amidst apparitions, that stay on optimistically dormant to haunt us on where we come from, and where we wish to go back to? How is it that the urge to ‘give’ remains to shake the nonchalance we display at it? How is it that life is still led at normalcy, while the lack of its worth is felt as an ignorant shadow at every step?

I am not sure of these answers I seek or questions I ask? But, as I take a step back and reminiscence a fast-forwarded flashback on life, with incepts of joys, misgivings, love, skirmish and achievements, I am at a loss of words to describe the wonderment and childlike contentment I feel, knowing that I would be soon tasting amma’s avial and small talking with pals at gangotri over rounds of bhel puri.

At these times, I am glad life doesn’t give you a rewind switch; for the pleasure of reliving moments and yearning for them is a bliss better than the moment itself.