Homecoming

A moonlit summer night back home. This is our mango tree bursting with this year's harvest. Thanks Bapa, for sending the seasons attached in emails.

So the restlessness has finally made its way into my days. The time has come when nothing, absolutely nothing can inspire me to be at peace with myself. My mind feels like a giant time bomb, ticking away furiously. In just another week I shall have what I have been longing for since what feels like ages. At last, after a year and a half, I will be home, that one word which is so powerfully potent of exciting so many emotions at one throbbing gush. The carnival of faces of your loved ones, the celebration of the familiar, the surprises because so many things have changed...

At the moment I feel a little blurred with emotions and so I have run out of my word bank. I think I must borrow the haunting nostalgia from Agha Shahid Ali's Postcard from Kashmir, which has often been by my side whenever the longing for home has swallowed me up.

Kashmir shrinks into my mailbox,
my home a neat four by six inches.
I always loved neatness. Now I hold
the half-inch Himalayas in my hand.

This is home. And this the closest
I'll ever be to home. When I return,
the colors won't be so brilliant,
the Jhelum's waters so clean,
so ultramarine. My love
so overexposed.
And my memory will be a little
out of focus, it in
a giant negative, black
and white, still undeveloped.