My 2008 trip back home to India

(I had this post written and published in early February 2008 and just recently transferred it from an older blog to out here)

After months of delays, I will finally be traveling to Mumbai at the end of this week for my long due vacation. Excitement has always been an understatement to describe my feelings associated with this trip. It's always a whirlpool of emotions that get stirred up with visiting one's home, being received into the eager arms of your people, being greeted by the kind faces of your kin, seeing the sights that date back to your childhood and feeling the warmth of being back in that place that you will always call your very own.

It's the journey you want to take back into time, hoping that it has stood still for your return :) And yet you know that time has flown by at the instance you lay your foot on the warm soils of your homeland. The population, their pace, the structures and all their collective energy will have acquired so many strange and different forms that they will be near unrecognizable to you, who had left them behind in what was probably a far more familiar state. And then you start wondering whether you can ever belong back to your homeland with same intimacy that you had half a dozen years ago.

But amidst all the unfamiliarity of sights, chaos of voices and conflicts in your mind, you slowly start recognizing a striking familiarity. It's the familiarity of emotions flowing from those loving hearts, the simplicity of the feelings in those unchanged minds and the peace in the secure embraces of every man, woman or child you had ever shared your memories with.

Well, I get this feeling every time I return for my brief vacation. It takes me a good amount of time to get used to the overwhelm at first. There are so many sights and breaths to intake and get a hang of, yet you are left asking for more and more :) And then when I have gradually settled into a lukewarm pool of acceptance, familiarity and generosity, I find out that its time to return to where I came from.

The question I ask is, how many years of separation would I need to exchange in return for the bliss of my own home. Whatever that figure maybe, someday I hope to have made it to this place I have always known as my very own :)

With lots of nostalgia
-Michelle