Of Loss...

Life is strange. Sometimes, the most essential part of it is so ruthlessly snatched away from us, a part that swayed between our conscious and subconscious but which always existed and defined what we are.

Growing up in an industrial township where qualified professionals only come for work, I always knew that someday my dad too would retire, leave the city and settle amidst his brethren. So it was never a big deal when I left it after school and returned only to spend a fortnight each year, when my parents bought a house in Calcutta (really sorry, but I still hate calling it Kolkata) and when a year back we started discussing his retirement.

It was only when I came home for the pujas this year that my heart revealed a strange emptiness, a gap that for so long I knew not of. The small station where I would never de-board again, the two lane roads that I often cursed returning from a six lane city, the night that descends at eight in the evening, the club where I have swum since I was three and hogged on pakoras and cheese balls and french fries later, the houses that I have shifted with my belongings, the school that characterises me; I will never return to these. Never travel by the teeny bus to the only hospital in town and never ride a cycle to its farthest corners.

A small town girl with small town sensibilities, where matters of the heart outweigh the complexities of the mind. A place where I have dwelled with more varied cultures, traditions, languages and friends than in the capital of the country. Where I have learnt that knowledge doesn’t mean a school that bankrupts your parents and talent doesn’t belong to a select few. This is my place; my roots are here; it has nurtured me and moulded me and it has made me the emotionally psyched person that I am; the liberated liberal individual, the believer of faiths and goodness, the strong headed and the soft hearted, the traditional with a modern world view, the materialistic with immense love for humanity.

Now my parents are moving to a big city and I live in a big city, struggling to live a life. I am being cut off from my roots and will be planted elsewhere. I chose that years ago but had a nerve connecting me to it; now I have none. I am being completely and irreversibly taken away; shoots, leaves and all.

Will I be a different person, now that I have nothing to hold on to? Life is too long and I have so much to see, to learn, to come across and to endure. Only life knows, now that it takes away my past, how it will fill up the gorge that it has left behind, in my heart, in my soul.