Epilogue: The Journey Home

 

Epilogue: The Journey Home

As a seven-year-old, I had no idea what that train journey north meant.

I didn't particularly care either.

As long as I was with my parents and my sister, life was good.

Delhi felt different when we arrived. The language was different, the food was different, the weather was different, and pretty much everything outside our little world seemed unfamiliar.

But we created our own island.

Within that island were our parents, our Tamil, our food, our traditions, our little community and, eventually, our friends. That island gave us the time to absorb the differences around us and, slowly, become part of the larger Delhi.

And then, more than forty years later, it was time to leave.

In 2017, my parents decided that Delhi's summers were becoming too harsh and the winters, with their increasingly terrible pollution, were no longer worth enduring. They decided to move back south to Chennai.

I went to India to help them.

The house had already been sold.

We emptied it, sorted through years of accumulated possessions, packed what mattered and loaded the memories of decades into a truck headed south.

Then we boarded a train ourselves.

The Tamil Nadu Express was considerably faster than the train we had taken in 1975, but "faster" is relative when you are still spending two nights on a train.

Somewhere during that journey, Appa said something that has stayed with me ever since.

He looked at us and said:

"I brought you guys here in 1975, and now you are taking me back to where I came from."

That sentence felt heavy.

In 1975, he had brought his family north.

In 2017, his children were taking him south.

The same family, traveling in opposite directions, forty-two years apart.

It was only much later, when I began writing these stories, that I saw another parallel.

Appa had looked north for opportunity.

Years later, I had looked west.

He had packed up his family and moved them into an unfamiliar world.

I eventually packed up my own life and did something similar.

I had never thought of it that way before.

Perhaps I'll save that story for the next edition.

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