I feel a little bit like a snail these days. It’s not only that I’m moving slow, but that I’m learning to carry my home with me wherever I go. This is the biggest lesson I think I learnt from my stay in Germany which turned out to be a good three months longer than intended on account of a broken ankle.

At first it had seemed like a nightmare. The night I landed up in hospital and they wheeled me down one long empty, tube lit corridor after the other all the way into a ghostly x-ray room, I felt I had accidentally tumbled into a Kafka novel. I kept thinking I would wake up and everything would be fine. Instead the doc held up the x-ray and said the fracture was so bad he didn’t know if the bone would ever heal.

Once I had dealt with my yearning and homesickness for India in those initial two weeks or so, India ceased to exist for me. It was as if I had never known any other home than Ariela’s – the friend who was taking care of me. When the time came for me to return to my country I actually wondered what the hell I would do when I was back. I began to wonder what and where home really was, or what it meant, because by then the little town called Prien which had played host to me all this time, had come to seem like home.

Now back in Bombay it feels like I had never been away. In hardly any time I have grown accustomed to life here the way it has always been. Heavy traffic on the roads, the two cantankerous maids pottering about the house, driving each other and everyone else crazy, TV dialogues loud enough to bust your ear drums. (I’d forgotten that in India most of us are deaf), slow internet connection and all the rest. What the hell, the sea makes up for everything and the smells of Indian curries coming from the kitchen right now. Getting together once again with friends I left behind. And being able to sleep again in my own bed.

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