Reflections on a dew drop

It was a reasonably warm winter afternoon in Minneapolis (by its standards) when I left my apartment for the airport to embark on the long journey to India. I stood by the stairs for a moment and reflected upon how the last one and half years had flown by and how I had begun to think of this place on the other side of the world from where I grew up, as a new home. It was also that strange feeling of going from one home to another that took me back in time five years ago. It had been again on a winter afternoon in Kharagpur, albeit without the snow and not nearly as cold, where whilst travelling to the station on my way home to Kolkata I had for the first time experienced that feeling; when I first looked back and thought “I will miss this place”, even though I was only going home. I realize now, that feeling is the making of a new ‘home’, the consummation of a new relationship.

Settling down in a new place and calling it your home comes with a lot of emotional upheaval. It’s like starting a new relationship, breaking and creating again something very personal. There is of course the inevitable initial stage of distress involving breaking of old bonds, ties and dismantling the ‘homely’ space that everyone creates for themselves. Everyone who has left home to live elsewhere can identify with the painful longing to go back to one’s familiar space in these early stages. Slowly, however, you start loosening some of the old ties so that new ones can be built. That is the birth of a new flower that blossoms till you have little bits of memories, experiences and a whole lot of inner feelings and emotions pervading its very fragrance in due course of time—the “little things that make a house a home”.

As I prepare now, three weeks later, to begin the return journey to the US, I am aware of that familiar feeling once more—the very same one I had also felt a few days ago when I visited Kharagpur after eighteen months. All these places have taken up spaces in my consciousness and bring forth different memories, emotions and aspects of my inner self which all add up to make me who I am. As much as I have lived in these places, they also live inside me. It is difficult to truly pin point what I miss about these places. Is it the frenzy of Kolkata, my childhood memories, or the food or my friends and family? Is it the freedom and freshness of Kharagpur, or of doing so many things the first time? Or is it my work, or the independence or the order and polish of my new life in Minneapolis? In reality, it is never discrete, but always a stream of expressions, which like a river carries the soil, mud and water from the past and builds up the banks of consciousness for a new phase of life. Today, as I watch the last rays of the sun disappear over the smog in my beloved hometown, I realize that I would be home again to watch the next sunset, albeit on the other side of the globe. That is a feeling I truly cherish. Looking at the twilight sky, I promise myself to keep the river of expressions flowing in me, take me along its course—maybe in search of new homes, or maybe to bring me back, as Tagore said, to admire that lonely dewdrop on the wayside field that I had been so ignorantly oblivious to all along.