Thursday 17 December 2009

‘What is it that’s lost when you cross a border? Each moment seems to be split in two. Melancholy for what was left behind and on the other hand, all the enthusiasm at entering new lands'
- The Motorcycle Diaries




Finally, the time has come for me to go back. It still doesn’t seem real, none of it. Neither the fact that I’ve been here for 14 months nor that in about a week I won’t be anymore. The day we knew for sure that I was going to come to York, my mum said she felt exactly the way she did when I was starting school. And sure enough it was just that all over again. An event that would mean that I would have to leave home, that I would meet new people and make new friends, that I would find new interests, start dressing differently, that there would be things I wouldn’t be able to wait to share with everyone at home and that there would be things that I couldn’t tell them.

It has been a good year. I met wonderful people and saw literally magical places. (I’m definitely not the first to discover that if you see the Yorkshire moors, it’s Tolkien’s middle earth... it’s all here!)It has taught me a lot and the things that have happened within this period have given me peace and pains and pleasures in parts of my mind that I didn’t know I had.

Call it a full circle or whatever you will but I remember being excited and devastated in equal parts when I left India, and now that I’m going back it’s the same feeling. Yes, home will always be home and it’s a very different kind of devastation but I look back on the year that I spent in those two houses on Tang Hall Lane and I can’t help thinking... I may never see those places ever again... and when I’m sitting in my lovely house in Pune – sunny, warm and infested with marvellously wilful dogs and people- those houses will seem like two tiny little dots so far away in time and space that soon I won’t be able to touch them even in my memories...