Longings and belonging...

I have been stationed at my hometown with the entire family for past couple of months now. Never had I ever imagined that I will get to live with family for a prolonged period such as this. Nor had I imagined that I will fit in without grinds and chings.

        The last I remember of living with my family was 14 years ago. I had just completed Class Xth exams and was about to dive headfirst into a world of joy. The huge summer months stretched before me along with a plethora of hormones to wreak havoc upon my world. The dry, harsh winds seemed pure bliss and I had my steady steed, a gleaming blue 'Hercules Y-series' bicycle (codenamed "Mercedes"), well-oiled to concur the horizon. The cellphone had not disrupted lives yet and I adored riding Mercedes to the lake across town.

        Alas! Fate always plans differently than we do, and strangely at that. I spent the first month immediately after my exams in a hell-hole called Nallakunta, the dark side of an otherwise lovely city (Hyderabad). The month was spent preparing to enter the Ramaiah IIT Study Circle, the coaching with supposedly the highest % of top rankers in IITJEE (now called JEE Advanced). And the coaching institute holds its own entrance exam, which needed to be prepared for by joining another coaching institute. To cut a long story short, I was studying in a coaching to crack the entrance exam of another coaching, which will then go on to coach me to crack the IITJEE.

        In all my candor, I have never been a top ranker, nor hoped to be one. But the 4 other folks with whom I was sharing a room seemed to be having a world of knowledge which had somehow eluded me (still does!). Needless to say, I didn't crack the Ramaiah entrance, nor the IIT-JEE main list. The only consolation was landing into the Extended Merit List, which was worth very little in reality but was a huge achievement for a student of my splendor. Modest and honest much? You bet. 

        Anyhow, thereafter started a journey which only took me further and further away from my family home. I lived in Nagpur during my early teenage years with a couple of months in Thailand. Next stop Kota (Rajasthan), then an year-long stint at home because I had made good use of Kota resources, and then to Goa for Mechanical Engineering for 4 years. Thereon, I lived in Jhansi, Coimbatore, Bengaluru, Delhi, Gurgaon, Lucknow, Bhopal, Indore, Noida, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Europe (briefly) and, most recently, Hyderabad. All this while, I kept shooting in and out of my family home over the festivals, long weekends etc. 

        Houses I have changed many, seldom found a home. I believe human beings are both, wanderers and home beings in a strange sense of balance. I, for one, crave travelling to all corners of the earth (not a flat-earther, relax!) and coming back at the end of a trip to a place where the heart belongs. And while I condemn the COVID with all my restless heart, a little part of me is grateful for the changes it brought in its wake. 

      The other day, I stepped out on a random, pointless night walk. My bluetooth earphones passed away recently and left me no other choice but to be mindful of the moment for once. And I noticed things which have been there for ages, but never been noticed before. The way each house was uniquely shaped, colored and lit up. The sounds and the sights from many, the darkness and melancholy in some others. As if each one was living a life of its own, reminiscing its choices and plagued by time. 

There are stories all around. The house on the corner with a huge, unkempt lawn and rooms a tad smaller. The streets running across two sides of its fence and the ditch gushing joyfully. The shop with a house behind, the two families living in a home divided by the wall amidst their courtyard, witness to the feud from decades earlier, just like the mango tree which towers over our roof. 

There was a ground where I played a lot, back when playing cricket held my fancies. It inclined heavily in the middle and gave a good practice of facing bouncers. For someone who has always been short for his age, the lopsided pitch gave me a readymade excuse for lousy batting skills. During the monsoons, it used to become a neighborhood lake for us to float paperboats and bounce pebbles on. The ground has all but disappeared with the lake and has been covered with buildings now. The paperboats and pebble moments have been replaced by brick & mortar. And the short, scared kid has been replaced by a man, a little overweight for his age, a little less scared of the bouncers in life but still falling short. 

On the other side of the ground there was a lone house, wherein an elderly gentleman used to dish out sweets to everyone who came after the evening aarti (worship). Not once did I talk to him, save for the few lines when I was thirsty after a long bicycle ride and he used to give me water with a gentle smile. It was like an unspoken bond he had with the world, no questions asked and no returns expected. In gratitude, I used to touch his feet respectfully before heading back. The house stands there to this day, no longer alone. However, both the elderly gentleman and his unconditional bond are lost in time. The little tired kid still goes there at times, half-expecting the smile to be gleaming at him again.

Everywhere I look, I see a moment lived, a memory captured and an era long gone by. I may have travelled far, but all I have done is come back home.