What does it take for a place to become home?
Learn how to get there: road and vehicle, go to a restaurant nearby, at least twice, learn which switch works what. Maybe even make yourself breakfast? Do laundry.
Despite all this Goa hadn’t been home.
I bought fruits. Not home. Got fined by the traffic police. Still not home. Recommended a restaurant, told someone directions. Got eve-teased and touched.
I saw it too do the prettiest thing a city can do, which is to have a flock of parrots fly in it’s sky.
But that only made me think of a place far off, the skies of which I prefer over these. Of my pillow, the window, the sunset outside it. The smallness, the gossip, the repetition and the closeness of family.
Till I came back to the house at night and had a letter waiting for me. I checked thrice, and each time I opened my eyes the cover still said my name. Everyone was confused, no letters come to rented festival dump-rooms with fewer mattresses more people and hair in the bathrooms.
But it had and in a moment of pure joy, I took the letter, hugged the giver and danced into the hall. I ran up the stairs and told everyone on the way of what I had in my hand. A green-blue proof of belonging, to a person a place, a deserved, but the one I don’t have to, love and the sheer physical proof of mattering to someone tiny in the big universe. I flaunted to the world this green-blue degree of sorts. I rewashed my hands, the ones I don’t before eating, changed my pants, took the uncomfortable toe ring that had been poking me for 28 days off, and read your letter.
I was in Hyderabad, at the crowded GPO, in rickshaws talking to people, scolding them lovingly, buying things, with you. In Hyderabad, and in Goa, I felt like home, in that moment.
and just like that, dear bub, you made this world smaller and easier to navigate. You make it easier to eat the cake in spite of the tutti-fruity. (Good point, bad example)
