At around 11 pm on the 11th, which happens to be an hour ago from today, I began crying in my bed. Round, warm teardrops forming in my eyes and falling on to my pillow, wetting it. I knew I would not be too pleased with the dampness once the moment had passed. But that unpleasantness would come later, for in that glorious half an hour of victorious weeping, I was set free. Maybe it was the imminent periods, which were drawing closer with every crumbling cramp, or the tranquilizer I had swallowed to overcome an anxiety attack before it overcame me, but the crying had been an almost unexpected event that set into motion many memories and a reassuring revelation— I was homesick. I just did not know for where.
I couldn’t possibly be homesick for Allahabad, no. The city had given me nothing but tremendous tumultuous, tragic, traumatic memories that were getting too heavy to carry around with each passing year. Maybe I was homesick for Aligarh. The city was a four inches long pothole of patriarchs purging women as a delicacy before throwing them in boiling water. And yet, home is found and felt in the unlikeliest of places. The city and its dwelling were not the Burrow and the university as far from being Hogwarts as Uncle Vernon was from mounting a broomstick, but sitting under the stars at three in the morning surrounded by friends is as close as I have come to a Gryffindor dormitory with five four-poster beds, perhaps because I was sorted into Ravenclaw by Pottermore. Maybe I am homesick for those friends in this vast city with no one to call my own. Homesick for a familiar voice and recognizable laugh. Homesick not for a place but for people to sleep peacefully and smile carelessly with.
I miss my mother too, whom I haven’t seen in months. Yet, not always does one give in to missing people one loves. For as heart-achingly difficult it is, sometimes love means taking a step back and not calling each other all day. Sometimes love requires you, begs of you to make them learn to let go. It doesn’t matter then, the number of Instagram followers. It has been fifteen days since I have obsessed about losing Instagram followers, since I long-pressed the application icon and moved it around in a brand new folder that I specially named toxic time waste. It gets to your head and health, eternally watching people with owing everything better than you own, doing everything better than you do. They can keep receding each day, those followers, because on a lonely Monday night in a city that still hasn’t made me its own, locked in my one bedroom apartment with the rest of the world behind closed doors too, I missed my family and friends. One has need of family and friends, never of followers. One misses home, and home is a three dimensional four walled person with people, never an algorithm.
Painting from the Momoyogusa collection
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