I live my life constantly looking wistfully over my shoulder, brooding about what I have left behind.
While in Pune, I thought of Kolkata. While in England I thought of Kolkata and Pune. And now in Bombay, I think of England. It can get irritating – for me, but more for those around me: this constant belief that the past was better.
This constant looking back is more like flipping through an album in my mind – an album populated with moments, conversations, looks, half-smiles, sounds, smells and thoughts. It’s an album that I carry with me all the time and browse whenever I feel like a glimpse.
For the past few days, I have been browsing the England bit of the album, quite frequently. I even pulled out actual photographs and smiled at them. Yes, wistfully.

I don’t think I am good at saying this – maybe because I don’t say this often enough… miss you guys… you know who you are.

Have you ever felt that you have just woken up – you might not have been sleeping at all really – and thought that you have not been leading your own life?
Caught up in what you do everyday – you know the grind, don’t you – the life you knew as your own had just slipped through your fingers while you were paying the taxi driver, or fumbling for your phone in the bag on the way to work or typing out emails on the office keyboard. And all it takes is a moment, an elusive one, to suddenly realize that.
One such moment happened a couple of weeks back. Let’s just say, I found myself wandering around my neighbourhood, completely aimlessly, at an unearthly hour in the morning. There was absolutely nothing that I wanted to do and nowhere that I was going. I was just… wandering.
That is when it dawned – like the day that was breaking around me – that it had been a long time since I had been myself. Myself, as I know it.
The last one-and-a-half years I have been a lot of things – let’s not get into that – but myself perhaps. It’s quite convenient to blame it all on the pace of life and living and all the accompanying hype but that would really be unfair, and untrue.
So when was it that I was last myself? England, I think. London. Pontoon Dock. I was told that I giggle a lot, wear too little and read too much. Giggle? Hm. Someone in Bombay said I am the most depressive person he has ever come across. Quite a shift, isn’t it?

So now I am reclaiming that giggling, reading, wandering bit of me.