I honestly think, if someone ever asked my soul, my whole life can be summed up as an ever-lasting quest for home, which almost felt like the unreachable horizon that only moves away further as you think you are getting a little closer. I also think it is a reason I ceased to be ambitious, because I just realised none of this mattered, all that did was the well being of my people and my own joy too.
Unlike most people, I somehow don’t happen to remember my childhood, but for as far as I can, I just remember missing a man and hoping a miracle for returning my dead dad to life. It would take me eight years and seeing that helpless thread of tears in my mom’s eyes that I would decide to leave that chapter behind to never look back.
Even as the world continued to miss my dad, I just knew that those left behind were more important as I finally begin to understand, dead don’t come back. It would still take a few more years before I would truly begin to love and bond with mom, only to thereafter feel entrapped in a helpless paralysis of not being able to get to a place I could make it all even and life a little easier for mom and bhai.
It seemed impossible to reach a point my soul could sit in peace and call the moment her home. For the longest time, my only desire to date was a helpless hope for someone else to just come and miraculously take away this pain and fix this for us as three people continued to carry a dead man’s weight.
Many people tell me I am probably too soft, emotional, weak, sensitive and on days too good for my own sake. Over the years, I would learn to better my pretend game. But, on days people try to reduce me to moments of despair and exhaustion or tell me how I had it so much more easily…I wish I could explain how I knew this all and how seeing my mom and bhai struggling when I had a cake walk and me failing to suffice that breaks my heart.
A part of me yearns for a regular life, without having so much to think and worry about. But the other part of me is often bogged down by the guilt of privilege and actually having a good life while mom and bhai remained married to struggles all these years.
I am much older and naturally realistically disillusioned & pessimistic, yet also grateful and hopeful, depending on my days. But, my quest for home remains the only insatiable desire.
But, 24 or 80, I think books and pen would always remain my most surreal joys. The two somehow manage to capture the rare occasions when I feel like I belong and I don’t depend on another soul to find joy and peace. It is an inexplicable feeling, how I just feel subtly happy to be alive…nothing in the world ever moves me like that. For those few moments, I feel like I have found my home. Its almost like a bird coming back to its nest after a long day of flight. I think in paper and pen my soul finds its home, even for a fleeting moment.
Vaishnavi Sood 