Yesterday as my partner and I chimed in over a video call, adding to the chorus, while my father cut a scrumptious-looking chocolate cake my sister got him for his birthday, I felt momentarily transported to Kurla; because everything that was in our field of vision was so familiar to me—the furniture, the angle of light from the window, the greenery that borders this space between the domestic and the external, tended to by my mother, and even the sounds that permeate and percolate through the day. I was, in fact, in our apartment in Tramin, gaping at the foggy, cloud-drenched landscape and the manifestation of rain, studded by the ephemeral formations of starlings in the distance, an un-choreographed sweep of flighty wings. Technology can be fraudulent that way, tricking you into believing you are present in an elsewhere moment when in fact you are dislocated, hinged in a context so different from everything else you’ve known; and that’s the distance that’s hardest to bridge, the ever-widening gap between the worlds you knew before and the one you are still in the process of inhabiting. It is also why you know in your gut that even when you are able to visit the elsewhere you left behind, you will never be able to truly return, because your being has been fundamentally altered. 

I often feel the invisible, un-surveyed and illusive boundaries between the ‘third world’ from which I come, and this ‘first world’ in which I am making home. Sometimes I find myself dissolved between them, unable to coherently articulate the particular loneliness as well as joy that accompanies the immigrant experience of re-settling. There is a legacy to the form of exile to which I stake claim: the refugee status of the woman who leaves her maternal home to shelter within her marital home. One has to acclimatise to different ways of being and doing than those to which one was accustomed. I hadn’t expected, of course, that such an elaborate span of time would lapse between my arriving here and returning to India, even if only to visit and conduct research, so the circumstances feel unusual. The longing has compounded and now occupies a more mythic space. I don’t confuse it with nostalgia. There are many things that punctuated the mundane back home that I do not miss at all: the incessant blare of horns; the traffic snarls; forms of uncivil behaviour, like skipping queues; the inability, sometimes, to listen to silence. The other day my sister called me during a long taxi ride. Despite the closed windows, I could hear the continuous clanging of horns which felt deafening and distracting. While I miss being able to imbibe the Diwali spirit, I am happy to be away from the ever-ensuing pollution that was always a by-product, firecracker ban or not.