Dear Diary

Its Mahanavami, ninth day of the Hindu festival of Navratri. We celebrate the win of good over evil by praying to nine Goddesses, who represent the all-encompassing powerful feminine energy that runs this Universe. We celebrate the women around us, as human forms of the goddess and if you’re a young girl, it’s the season of being showered with gifts and goodies. Sadly, I’ve outgrown that category. My social feed is filled with Garba reels, Pujo festivities and Golu decorations as each region in India celebrates. After a particularly out-of-control month, the familiarity of home – even a brand-new home, is a welcome change.

I hadn’t realized how much I missed my mom’s sense of humor, my dad’s eyerolls, or their constant bickering. As I am handed a bucket of laundry to do, I am forbidden from listening to music on my air pods (I’d been hoping to continue my streak of jamming with The Cranberries given a recent obsession with Derry Girls). “I need to keep talking to you, you’re barely here” mom says, and with that loaded sentence she’s undefeated.

I don’t know how parents do it. Most of my peers and I are still figuring out how to live our own lives. Maybe our generation was raised differently? With a lesser sense of responsibility, and definitely less pressure to build a family. Would I be able to manage what my parents did at my age? – uh not at all, I can barely manage to get through a workweek and remain in one piece. As I read through my old diaries and journals (in the name of unpacking), I realize that younger me was much more emotionally sound, had her life together, AND a better sense of humor. It’s a weird feeling to envy my past self – a happier, prouder, more ambitious, more driven version. Is that a recurring feeling as we grow older? In one way, I achieved those goals so I should be grateful, but in another, now I am relatively rudderless. With experience, I’ve realized I can’t navigate my days with the goal of “chill” and need the ten-point plan to not spiral into dismay.

Kochi doesn’t care about my inner battles; the cloudy skies and rainy evenings remain exactly how I’ve always known them. The plantains and coconut trees constantly in your line of vision. Home. My father has spent his entire life in this city of Kochi. As we drive through its streets, he seems to be in a rare chatty mood and takes us by his old primary school that he attended from grades 1-4 (that’s the early 70s). It’s a typical Kerala style building with wooden windows, where my father and his friends used to sit and watch the cars pass by during their lunch break, and play the numberplate game. In the same drive, he uses Siri on his car phone to call a bunch of people with super long South Indian names, which surprisingly didn’t confuse Siri as much as one would imagine. It’s incredible how much he has seen over the last five decades, and has always managed to stay up to date. He’s had an Instagram account before I did.

So here I am, eating my Idli-Vada-Sambar breakfast for the second morning in a row, far from the world of calorie deficits. After months of living around people with a genetically different body type than mine, I care a little less this week about how many full meals I’m consuming. That’s what home is for, isn’t it? Even if the “home” feeling has been split up across the various cities you’ve called home in the last decade. Even if you feel like an outsider in the city you grew up in because you missed so many of its recent developments. Even with all the noise and elderly quips and “oh you’ve gotten so fat/thin” (WHICH one is it?); a home still grounds you, brings you back to (0,0,0). You can tell I watched Encanto on the flight. I have a lovely week of catching up with friends, setting up my room and happy cuddles ahead. From one of the suitcases, my dad hands me a bunch of currency notes from the different countries he’s visited, neatly stacked, and tied with an elastic. “You work in FX markets right; you should be able to clear these.” Fair enough I guess.