Homecoming
2022 started off on a wistful note for me.
We spent the first day of the year travelling from Mumbai to New Delhi. Masked up, preparing for the latest onslaught of COVID-19 related entry requirements in Europe.
Tired after having spent 15 hours transiting in Doha, bleary eyed and cranky — we arrived on the first red eye to Copenhagen on Monday morning, ready to conquer the first working day of the year.
The first few hours passed in a blur. Arrival, immediate grocery run, shower and ready to log on to the home office.
As the day drew to a close, I walked warily into the room housing our unpacked suitcases. With a sigh, I started on the chore of unpacking.
The big black and white sticker is the first thing I focused on: BOM-CPH it reads. This time around, my labels even included a huge red stamp that said “EXPEDITED BAGGAGE TO COPENHAGEN”… courtesy my adventure before boarding at the Delhi airport. Security personnel wanted to make sure that I was not carrying any coconuts… (I know!).
Anyway. Back to work. I set about unpacking my big brown suitcase — full of yet another trip to India. Yet another endeavour to stuff a whole other life into a 30 kg suitcase.
It’s funny, I think. That I would tell you I have just returned from a trip home, but also that I am happy to be back home. All in one sentence, and it would both make perfect sense to me.
As I unpacked, smells of my Indian home wafted out. My favourite Indian snacks (shout out to ‘mixture’, a snack that is exactly what it says it is), bottles after bottles of vatha kuzambhu and puliyodharai pastes (yum!), vepla katti packets. Agarbatti boxes. Small mementoes to give friends. Odd travel curiosities.
These tiny objects, these small food items — this will sustain me for yet another trip around the sun. Another bout of a cleaved existence. Where who I am when I am in India is so different to who I have to become in Denmark.
I wonder if others share the same sentiments as me, if other expats too feel as though their lives outside their home countries are different to the ones they lead abroad. Not just in practicalities, but sometimes also in philosophies.
I wonder if other people too, feel a keen division in their lives.
Every time I go back home to India, it feels as though I never left. I can pick up right where I left off, getting right back into the mix of things.
I am pampered, sheltered, a child in my parent’s eyes again. I go home to my mother’s embrace, my father’s silly jokes. My neighbours’ familiar faces. It’s not as though nothing happens for the first time when I am home in India — au contraire. This recent trip home was filled with many firsts.
- I was an aunt, in-person, for the very first time. Locking eyes with my nephew for the first time since he was born, knowing in an instant that I will never stop thinking of him as my baby.
- I met my sister (my twin, really!) after three years apart. The first time since COVID-19. The first time since she became a mom!!!!
- I took Niko home for the very first time, making two big parts of my world meet for the first time.
But yet, there is always an undercurrent of familiarity. Something about having had a childhood in a place always leaves a tinge of nostalgia, I guess.
After all, going home means that I am back within the same walls I grew up in — the place where I dreamt all those dreams of adolescence, the place I was a child for the very last time. The place where a child-version of me always remains.
I think growing up can be overrated sometimes. Sometimes it’s underrated.Time has an odd way of changing how we view things, what we paint as our reality. Back in Copenhagen, I continued unpacking, pensive, lost in this web of thoughts.
I’m back to real life now. Give it a day or two, the jet lag will fade.
Life will pick up its pace again. And without skipping a beat, I am home, again.
A different home, where in the winter, I come home to darkness at 3 PM, Christmas lights lending a hyggeligt glow to our apartment. A home where the wind bites my face, I have to cook everyday if I intend to eat, where I’m the adult — the only one to blame if things go wrong.
Yes, I’m home. Again.
And I’m all the better for it.
