Memory drops

droplet4, originally uploaded by jun_madayag2002.

As the day of my return approach, I feel I have been here for ever. The people back home who await my return fill me with a sense of joy and longing. Oh, it has been quite some time now that I have been oblivious of the daily hassles of life in Kolkata missing the touch of the near and dear ones. Arriving here sometime 2 years back on a bright sunny and colder-than-it-looked day and finding myself in a sea of unknown people with nothing more than a telephone number and a partial address I was horrified at the prospect of making my own way through this unknown country to Bristol. Everything looked impossible. But as someone I know well so aptly put it:

When you have come to the edge
Of all the light you know
And are about to step off
Into the darkness of the unknown,
Faith is knowing that
One of two things will happen:
There will be something solid to stand on
Or you will be taught how to fly.

I set about on the faith that I would be taught to fly. I was not mistaken.

Looking back now, I realise with a sense of nostalgia, I was so keen to have come to this country to see a new way of life that I almost did not take my eyes off the streets I passed in a cab, trying to engage in a social conversation with the Iraqi cab driver. Everything was so different. Streets were so quiet. Nobody seemed to honk. Houses looked so different. I was instantly in admiration for the country I was in, United Kingdom. Life is so easy here it looked.

I was fortunate enough to have worked with a group of people who were very different from each other and had provided me with so many opportunities for learning. It was only the other day that I had met them for the first time and it seems it is strange to be planning a return back without the hope of seeing some of them ever again. Some I will miss, some I will not but the whole idea of going back is now an uncharted territory. This whole mindset made me discover a very disturbing fact about me: I tend to hesitate to make a choice when they are equally balanced, somewhat like my favourite poem 'The road not taken'.