At home

It’s been a month since I returned to India. After spending a year in London, learning the ropes of writing, exploring the English land and witnessing the multiple facets of an independence life, I was back in Mumbai to growing chaos surrounding COVID-19. Okay, I’ll be honest here, I had returned from a vacation in Europe, which also includes Italy and France, in the first week of February, and after hearing about how a certain infected traveller had passed on the virus to the people on board some aircraft, a minuscule seed of fear was planted in me. A fear that was more a result of a human reflex to danger than the mind’s ability to process information and give a calculated reaction at a time when my imagination was taking precedence over the reality.

             A lot has happened in the month that went by. For the first few days after touching down in Mumbai, I felt fairly disoriented with the ongoings. As excited and upbeat as I was about getting back to the grind, there were a few things that stared me right in the face, with the obvious one being the weather. While the getting-back-to-work-after-a-year-of-studies affairs dominated my mind space for the first two weeks, the coronavirus distress started looming larger as time progressed. For some reason, back in London, I kept longing to be dressed in a single layer of clothing when I was wrapped with the insulation of padded clothes, but that was soon to change as soon as droplets of sweat began rolling down my neck and into the hollow of my hopes. I also remember how I was going over the almost exhaustive list of to-do things I had made during my last few days in London, on my flight to Mumbai, which, for reasons I’m yet to discover, now seems to have evaporated with the vehicular fumes I witnessed once I set foot on Indian soil.

             Amidst the rapidly changing global scenario and the growing amount of uncertainty that is filling the air, especially when my countrymen face more battles than ever before, I’m unsure about how to express how I feel or to which extent I must restrain myself from expressing what I really wish to. When the extent of problems seems to be growing - the massive Indian population of 1.3 billion crore faces a threat from coronavirus, the virus of poverty looms larger than ever before, religious fanaticism has taken a wild route, one that continues to cut its teeth into the country’s well-being and social fabric, one may not wish to announce how a thought has been spared, to lead a life away from the familiarity of my homeland; a place that owns me more than I own it. A place that has nurtured my ancestral lineage, and one which will always redefine what a family feels like even when I may not be around here.

              While I put my thoughts down, I cannot help but marvel at how my mind, which was hapless and frustrated with the my personal and professional struggles, most of which arose from changing my base one more time, made a sudden leap to include thankfulness and gratitude for my current state. I truly cannot be any more precise when it comes to stating how blessed I feel to have been reunited with my family and loved ones during this time of global crisis. It is during times like this that one’s faith is most tested and you are made to sit up and appreciate the course of action that nature takes. For you and for the world that you co-exist with.