Homecoming

I have lived in this city for 4 years and six months to the day. I've walked and run and driven all over these streets, shopped the stores and know the interesting places in the area. Planted flowers and pulled weeds through summer,watched bulbs I planted come up in the spring. Shoveled snow, built snowmen, thrown snow balls and made angels. Baked cookies and decorated Christmas trees, lit lamps for Diwali and eaten pongal with friends. Lived with friends and family, fallen out of love and in it, gotten married and played house. I've grown up here, in many ways.

And still, at the end of the day, I want to go home. Home to dusty streets and a pani-puri wala, home to noise and confusion and screaming contests with my mother, the maid, the furniture delivery guy, and the kid across the street. Just home. Home to the smell of rain and my mother's cooking, home to harsh white tube lights and laughing with my father. Where for some reason, I lose weight even as I eat my fill, where my skin stops reacting to the sun even when I spend the entire day outdoors. Where life flows seamlessly from the world around into me and back again.

It's not like I didn't try. Love, work, friends, traditions, fun- I listed the ingredients and captured them all, but it still wasn't home, until the sun rose this morning.

As I drove to work, the winter sun-that-might-have-been moon played through bare branches and wimpy clouds, pretending, trying, to warm the earth. And for the first time, I felt the season change. Something elemental, for there is nothing to suggest spring yet. Something instinctive, as the physical memory plugged in at last, connecting me to the pace of the seasons and whispering of things that are and things to come. The gentleness of snow, the depth of springtime, the strength of flowers and the warmth of the earth shielded by winter.

Once again, I feel the slant of the sun in my veins, as it changes from a blazing sunset on a Delhi terrace to this moon-sun that plays through trees and roofs and dances to a rhythm that I have only just begun to sense. I am learning, at last, the feel of the earth beneath my feet, the wind and the sun and the subtler, softer words they speak in this air. At last, we're on the home stretch. I touch the earth, and the earth touches me.