There and Back Again

You never grow out of home sickness, do you? Rather it grows on you progressively as you grow up. Or maybe it is that you become keener or more aware of what it is that never let you stay for more than a week at your Mausi’s place and run back home. There is of course that bit in you now which irks you with boredom at home, you fidget in the confinement, you crave to get out, but, you always, without fail, yearn to be back…back home.

The whole growing up just prevents you from bawling away and flatly refusing to budge from home or calling up your mother from a strange city and crying your heart out. Only now, you cry when they are not looking, maybe in the kitchen, maybe into the pillow at night. Just that now you realize that your parents when giving you strength to leave home or to stay put in a new place, grow steadily weaker. It is only now you realize how much of their life is about you, or rather all of it is. It is now that you start thinking how unfair that is. Always one for a balanced relationship, you now see how badly out of balance this relationship between parents and their kids is. Not that you care less for them, but while your day will comprise of your family, office, friends and many random people, so much of their day is spent in thinking about you, talking about you amongst themselves or to other people or waiting for that daily call.

Add to that the fact of you being hopeless when it comes to conveying that you care for them. Yours has never been a family of words, but gestures…so when you mother breaks down while making rotis for you, there is little you can do but cry with her. When you father points that today is the last day you are spreading that mattress on the floor to sleep on, with a smile, you can barely manage to say that you are coming back.

You are glad, that you are starting a new job, that you are at the onset of a new life, but you also know that your parents have long ago stopped giving any thought to their own life. It has been about you long ago, your school, your college, your fees, your clothes, your intern, your job, your marriage, your future kids. This should not happen. You know that in the long run you will be able to perhaps make up a bit for all the sacrifices your parents have made for you, but that seems so far…and so impossible to do.