Incredulously, as we neared Domigliari, moving further from the Alps towards Verona, the dense rain-drenched grey sky loosened up to reveal vast expanses of blue with an array of picturesque white clouds hanging over the horizon. It always amazes me, these perceptible shifts between regional borders, like when you cross the Brenner from North Tirol towards the South and the shift in landscape draws your attention, instead of meadows you see vineyards and apple fields. By now I’ve lost count of how many times I have taken the train between Auer and Venice and back, navigating between a site of work and ongoing research and a place that has become home. On Sunday, July 11, I returned to Tramin after almost three weeks of being away, of using Venice as a base as I travelled to San Marino, taking the train to Rimini, and to Sardinia, taking a flight via Rome. On the boat I encountered a most unusual homesickness, on the one hand I missed Mumbai and Delhi, on the other I ached for Tramin and the familiarity of my life there. Returning on Sunday felt like a homecoming. My partner waited for me on the platform at Auer and I ran towards him like a cliché. We celebrated a recent job offer I received with lunch at Alte Post, our favourite restaurant located down the stairs from where we live. I feasted on the chef’s preparation of Jakobsmuscheln and duck. That evening we went to our friend Kathrin’s home in Bozen for a pre-finals barbecue, which turned out to be a complete meat fest with generous portions of excellent couscous, grilled paprika, grilled aubergine and home-made pita. It felt so good to be ‘at home’ with people around whom I have grown so comfortable. 

Before and during my trip to Sardinia I had been proofreading a text that was about the Mapuche people and their struggles with reappropriating lands snatched away from them through the machinations of the nation-state of Argentina. It felt like an extension of some of my own recent reflections about what it means to belong to a place, to have a sense of being from it to the point where it is also of you. When we’ve been conditioned to believe we are entitled to ownership of land, that nature is something we must tame or exercise agency over, how do we transform the future potential of our dynamics with a place? I read an Instagram post about how choosing not to buy land is one plausible way of espousing a stance against colonialist or settler occupations. It means questioning our complicity in the continuing disenfranchisement of indigenous populations.