Tale of two cities.

Bangalore. Hyderabad. Bangalore. Hyderabad.Banga..

The old conundrum. The two cities my life revolves around in a seemingly seamless world.

It all happened that evening on a cold winter day. The heart was hesitant but the mind, unwavering in its resolve. It was THE chance. I had got an offer from the best company in the world and one that I had admired for years. How could I say no to that?

But the heart, resented. "Are you going to leave all this behind? The family, the friends, the city that you root for ever so vehemently, just to work in a celebrated corporate? are you going to....sell out?

Needless to say, the mind won. "It's alright. I'll work for a year, get a taste of working at this company  in a new city and come back."

A year flew by. When I was not looking,  two. Almost 3 years are rolling by now and I'm still there. And here. I make a note of all that has changed since I moved out. I run out of space.

One part that has remained constant though, is see-sawing between my life in Bangalore & my life in Hyderabad and being unsure where I really belong. I wonder if the difference really just geographical or something much deeper? At this point, I look back about 20 years when the biggest choice to be made was simply between a juicy lollilop or a fun candyfloss. But I really liked both.

Now another cold winter evening right now, I sit on my couch, watch TV with my dogs on either side of me. A simple , ordinary part of anyone's day. But for me this is unreal. Too comfortable to be true, maybe. This is my home. I live here with my flesh & blood. But I know this won't be there tomorrow. One journey of 12 something hours and a completely different world awaits on the other side, until the next trip home.

But I know I go back to the world, that I made and chose for myself. 'My' home as opposed to 'our' home? It's a world where I live life on my terms, it has people that I worked at bringing in my life. It's where every moment , every day of my life, is my responsibility and my own decision. It's the place where I believe I have found my calling, discovered who I truly am and grown as a person .

Then why do I keep coming back? How do I find myself on the next ride to back here at every given chance? Am I just living a constant trade-off between my independence and my roots. Or is this the world I never really left and all I'm doing is reconnecting with it every once in a while. I guess a part of me is afraid, afraid of losing this side forever, if I didn't keep lubricating the hinges of this connection, every now & then.

Maybe it's all pages of the book, I read with much relish and held close to my heart but in reality it's been read. All I do is flip back to the old pages and smell that familiar , comforting smell and then some.

Maybe I just live the best of both worlds.

I am not sure, which way I want it to be . Maybe I belong nowhere. Or somewhere in the middle.
NH7 to be precise.

At this point, it would be nice to paraphrase extract from Maya Angelou in Letter to My Daughter

Thomas Wolfe warned in the title of America’s great novel that ‘You Can’t Go Home Again.’ I enjoyed the book but I never agreed with the title. I believe that one can never leave home. I believe that one carries the shadows, the dreams, the fears and dragons of home under one’s skin, at the extreme corners of one’s eyes and possibly in the gristle of the earlobe.

Home is that youthful region where a child is the only real living inhabitant. Parents, siblings, and neighbors, are mysterious apparitions, who come, go, and do strange unfathomable things in and around the child, the region’s only enfranchised citizen.

We may act sophisticated and worldly but I believe we feel safest when we go inside ourselves and find home, a place where we belong and maybe the only place we really do."

Amen.