coming back

one day i sat with Sam cleaning up and organising her jewellery and make-up. and it felt like years ago when did and i would sit and go over our wealth of colourful earrings, pendants, rings, bracelets and what not. quarrelling, organising, spending hours just admiring our collection. of course we would end wanting to wear the same stuff on the same night, and with that came the bargains. those were good olds days. and coming back to today, that was what home was all about. sharing, fighting, talking, cleaning, and then of course covering up for each other. that day as i sat arranging the earrings, listening to old hindi film songs in good old moh.d rafi's voice, i realised i was homesick. first time that it hit me.

after i moved out of nagpur, i was very busyasserting my independence. my choice. my freedom to do things when and how i wanted. i lived with people, but i was answerable to myself. only. in pune, i eventually lived alone and loved it. i even got a pet, and my choice of pet was a fish. perfectly represented my frame of mind then. it was a fighter. beautiful, colourful and small, lived by itself, you put it with other fish and it would fight them till one of them died. and you never had to take too much care of it. feed it once a day and it didnt like too much meddling and cleaning of its bowl. leave me alone. i am independent.

then i moved to barcelona. to make friends. i did make them, but the number was not as much as i had imagined. the first year was hectic and passed away in a whizz. from 10 stereotypes in my mind, i moved to a 100, but still stereotypes. still independent. then i moved to london. and all of a sudden, my housemates were independent and yet spent quality time together. the balance struck me as so wonderful, that i was instantly hooked. i never knew this could be done before. i mean when you were not working or studying, didnt you end up spending all your time with someone or all your time alone? no. that was the key to balance. but london still lacked something. some warmth. was it too big a city? was it not clean enough?

i spent the next three weeks in greece and italy. different people, different places, different food. even had a routine where i probably did the most introspection i have ever done. that explains the lack of blogs in this duration. and then i came back to barcelona.

clean. neat. well lit. spacious. warm people. more than anything, familiarity. i stepped out of the airport, and i felt like i had come back home. and since i had left india, i had not come back to a familiar place. it had just been going on to more of new places. and thats when the homesickness started taking hold. now that i have tickets to india, i am looking forward to going back to another familiar place. the original home. dont worry, my adventure isnt over yet, it will continue even in india. i will go to places i haven't visited in india before. but then i will have found the balance between adventure and familiar. between independence and attachment.