I’ve already begun counting the days until I will be reunited with my family. Just before I began writing this, my partner told me that non-stop flights from Milan to Delhi have just been re-introduced. For a moment I considered changing our itinerary. We had configured a plan that involved flying from Milan to Dubai. This would allow us to break up the journey, our first with kid in tow, and offer us the privilege of staying a few days with my brothers and their families and visit the ongoing Sharjah Art Biennial. We’d then head to New Delhi and finally to Goa. I decided against tweaking our plans, though, because I am, by now, already excited about Dubai. It is also home, in some ways, since my brothers have been stationed there for more than two decades and I’ve travelled there so frequently, it feels familiar.

I cannot believe it will be almost three years since I left, and that I’ve had to contend with such a prolonged absence from my loved ones because of the pandemic and other systemic bureaucracies. My homesickness intensifies every day. At this point I can look at a banana that is taking four days to ripen and feel triggered by how alienated I feel from the fruits and vegetables that were so much a part of my daily diet. The bananas here are imported from South America, arrive raw and are sold almost raw; you have to wait until they yellow before you can actually unpeel them. I often buy them from the section of the supermarket reserved for items that are discounted because they are approaching their shelf-life expiry. This is the only way to be able to eat them on the same day. The cashier sometimes offers an even further discount because they are embarrassed by the ripeness. I tell them that where I come from, in Goa, there are so many different kinds and sizes of bananas and they vary in sweetness. Mangoes also elicit strong emotions. What is available here is also imported from South America and they taste like sweet water, bereft of any other nuance. On account of these emotional intensities, I keep returning to the concept of ‘the citizen of the country of longing’, a shadowy figure theorised in Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City. Mehta spoke about being in one place while dreaming of the one left behind, thus continually inhabiting an in-between island between two spatial entities.