In about two weeks I have a birthday coming up. The other night when it dawned on me that I would turn a year older, I found myself doing mental mathematics. I couldn’t remember my age. Was I 36 or 37? Would I be turning 38 or 39? I figured it was somewhere in the pre-40 vicinity, because I would have known if it was a milestone birthday, surely. My uncertainty surprised me. Did it attest to the fact that my memory was already growing dim or that I have arrived at a point in my life where the exact number of years I have revolved around the sun feels insignificant? I have a sensation of being in my late 30s, and, unlike when I was in my late 20s, I find myself joyously unambitious in terms of my career.

It is such a relief to feel like this. To be able to discern the pressures that are external and those that stem from within. As I was turning 30, I had an immense consciousness about the dimensions within which I wanted to inhabit my life. I wanted to have at least one book published, to reassure myself that I could, indeed, consider myself to be an author. I was privileged to be offered this column space, against which I have articulated my journey over these eight or so years. I was happily unmarried, living independently in Delhi and following a professional path I had charted for myself. As I near my 40s, I realise I basically undid or unsettled myself. I left all my safety nests behind and decided to make a home in another continent, so far away from friends and family, from the rootedness of my own context. I am married and the mother of a 16-month-old. I relinquished a life when sleep was a given for one in which I am regularly in bed by 10.30 pm so that I can break even on the sleep front. I’ve never been healthier. I’ve also never been so isolated. I left behind a thriving social life to build a future by the countryside in a border region that is bilingual. What compelled me to relocate and rebuild after securing my base over a decade?