The Dry Leaf

What is that which gives you the sense of belonging? What makes you identify with your ‘hometown’?

I wish to reach out to any person who has ever spent an extended amount of time away from their ‘home’ – the place where they grew up. As an individual who came to university and in late teenage lived ‘away’ for the first time and sees the end of this phase staring at him in his face, this is an attempt to enunciate certain feelings. The problem is that my ability to express is severely inadequate. It is hard to put such things into words. Please bear with me, for this means a lot.

I have spent a good part of the last three-and-half years bragging about my hometown to anyone who would raise the topic. The mere mention of the name has always made my chest swell with pride and an inadvertent smile to cross my lips. Anyone from my city automatically became an ‘ally’. It was – no is, IS, ­the best city in the whole wide world – a blessed city, a tiny little piece of heaven. It is a simple concept – the foundation of so many good memories made it impossible to feel any other way.

I make the journey back ‘home’ a couple of times every semester. As I leave behind the city where I live now, I reach out the closet people and share with them my joy of heading back. I do it every single time – compulsively. The homecoming is ecstatic and euphoric. The smile is and easy and fresh – like a mountainous brook. I am going ‘home’ – to family, memories, good food and oh! the blessed evening breeze. I reach ‘home’ and as the initial euphoria recedes, a strange realization dawns – there is something different about how I feel. Being ‘home’ is supposed to make you happy naturally, without you even noticing – like ice cream or candyfloss. Now, there is a separate undercurrent, a strange unease.

On the surface, everything is hunky-dory. I walk into ‘my room’; it exudes a warm becalming aura. I look around, and think everything is as I left it - almost. I walk upto my old closet and open it, expecting it to be full of my clothes. A complete mental picture of what thing lies where. I jump back horrified. The closet if full of my dad’s files and notes. The realization dawns that most of my stuff is now in the hostel, the rest had been moved ages ago to a smaller closet. Then the discerning realization – I knew my stuff was moved, but I had chosen to forget it……

….. I am looking for a pen; I wander into my old ‘room’ and poke my hand into a bowl by the bedside. I kept pens there, back when I ‘lived’ here. Nothing but dust. Again, the chocking realizations that I knew pens are no longer kept here.

A strange sense of desperation starts creeping in. The uneasy feelings seem to seep from below the doors, the cracks in the windows like a noxious gas, terrorizing, asphyxiating, driving me crazy. I look for things that make me feel I ‘belong’.  I cling onto some remnants. The house secrets – where to look for the cookies, for spare change etc, the smell of the incense my mother burns. I resign to the fact that I register small changes every time I come home, but I choose to forget them when I am at the hostel, restoring the memories to the ‘original, pristine’ state.

A friend calls – I go out to meet him. He asks me to meet him at a certain eating joint. Instantly, I am lost. Where is it exactly? I drift along the road knowing that I am nearby the place. Finally, slowly, I turn to a passerby and ask for directions – in my ‘own’ city. Numbness creeps in. Listen-nod-walk. Brain churning – I have been reduced to a tourist in my ‘own’ city. Just to add to the miserable feeling, someone asks me for directions. I mumble – I don’t know - hang my head and walk.

As I return home, the things I used to give myself a feeling of belonging earlier in the day feel alien in my head. I almost feel like an intruder. Knowing details that I shouldn’t know about the house – ‘my home’. Intimacy lies in the detail. The detail has been lost on me. The image has been so fogged that it is barely recognizable. My ‘home town’ is a phantom city now – its exits only in my head – as a mirage, as a fragile beautiful poignant memory. The reality is overwhelmingly different and obtrusively smashes through my conscience. I am trapped in a time vortex. The memories drag me down and my fear pulls me up. I hang in balance – my mind taking the worst brunt of the overwhelming realizations. There I stay – as Rushdie put it- knocked in the middle – neither able to let go nor to rewind time.

I amble out for an evening stroll – and the stunning evening breeze blows across my path a dry, fragile, wrinkled but beautiful leaf.

 It just makes me smile and well up…..