Back To England

The first and major leg of my mini-summer break is over. I wasn’t able to get away from my PhD as much as I wanted, and spent the first few days of my holiday moping over my PhD progression viva. I suppose a PhD is so all-consuming that there is no way to completely disconnect from it, especially if you don’t have a partner and family or other responsibilities. But, I saw my sister and her family and got my share of hugs to sustain me until the end of the year.

Saying goodbye to my sister is never easy but there are two occasions I remember in particular when it was particularly difficult. One was the day she got married and was leaving with her bridegroom after the ceremony. We both tore up while hugging, both (or me at least) struggling to grasp the momentousness of the occasion. The second time was when I visited her in Mexico in February 2013. She had come to drop me off at the airport at the end of my visit. Mexico is the other end of the earth from India and my U.S.-Mexico had filled me with a strange restlessness. I would spend the next year-and-a-half doing my best to move out of India. My possible work destinations would include London, Hong Kong and Qatar before I would decide to take a break from working and move to Holland to do a Master’s in August 2014. She and her family would spend a few months in India before I moved to Holland and then they would move to Brussels in the following year, which practically would practically make us neighbours. But, I knew none of that when I was saying goodbye to her at the airport that morning.

I suppose the difficulty off goodbyes also depends on what you are going back to. When saying goodbye to my sister after her wedding, I was going back to an engineering course that didn’t excite me and a hostel where I struggled to find people I could connect with. The first signs of my alienation with engineering had started to show, although I would only feel its full force over the following years.

From that Mexico trip, I was going back to a well-paying job that left me feeling unfulfilled and a deep desire to move out of the city that I had grown up in but had never managed to grow fond of. It was, of course, nice to be living with my parents but I always knew that my destiny wasn’t in Thane/Mumbai. The question was when, not if, I would move out.

To be honest, I have nothing to go back to in England except my PhD. But that is a good enough reason. At no other point in my life have I felt more satisfied with what I am doing. And my inward journey, of  which blogging is a big part, continues.