I am an only child. For the longest time whenever I said that it would be assumed that I was also a lonely child. However, for me loneliness is the last thing I’ve felt throughout my childhood. Being an only child meant that home was my anchor – a place that had everything I could ever need from love and care to a sense of familiarity and protection.
The concept of home has been an extension of my very existence. Home is familiarity, it’s the known world that nurtured me. I never switched schools or moved cities, my entire life has been one big constant moving at its own mellow pace never forcing me out.
Which is why leaving home last year was the hardest decision I ever made. Leaving for me wasn’t out of lack of choice but it was to expand my small world. However logical leaving seemed, it still didn’t make the decision any easier.
I couldn’t pause home while I existed in school. This meant that at every return, home felt different. The changes made it feel like I was neither here nor there. I was suspended mid-air between the past and my present. The bittersweet feeling of not being able to move on but the world continuing to move became a reminder of the changes that I couldn’t control and things that just couldn’t be held on to.
This Diwali, I returned home once again.
The impact of change grew stronger for me this year. I came home hoping to feel some form of the same comfort that I felt all throughout my childhood, especially with the realisation that this Diwali would be the last at home for a while as I would be moving to college. But once again, the reality of change came to shatter my comfort.
My maternal grandfather, my Nana, didn’t call me first thing in the morning, as was our ritual. My Nana was always the first call on any special occasion, whether it was a birthday or anniversary, and this wasn’t just for me. This year there was no early morning chirpy call wishing me ‘happy Diwali’ and making fun of my laziness as I would be sleeping in on Diwali. Instead, for the first time, I was the one to call him first. As I sat with my mother, video calling my grandfather, I slowly started to realise that the person with the sharpest memory I had ever seen could no longer remember me. His beautiful bright eyes, while happy, just looked confused trying to remember me. He smiled at me but not with familiarity and comfort, instead he smiled with the same politeness one shows a kind stranger on the street. My Nana, my pillar of remembrance and endless stories, was slowly fading away. In medical terms, this is called dementia.
As his reality slowly became fragmented pieces, my reality also turned into fragments, only resembling a shell of how everything used to be.
Time is relentless. As a child I couldn’t wait to grow up and be independent but growing up didn’t feel like all that. Instead it felt like a constant cycle of losing, and the people who made my world disappearing from it. As I sat on that call staring at the phone screen, I could just feel loss. I missed my Nana-ji being himself, I missed the life I had left behind and I missed the part of myself that was at home in a place that had completely changed.
The only regret I have in moving to a boarding school is the time I lost in my familiar bubble – a bubble that managed to completely change in two short years. It was no longer just physical distance – an emotional distance had managed to creep into my life too. The disconnect that existed between my reality of home and my memory of home. Every return home now feels like I am holding sand in my hands, with the grains slipping out just like my home slips away.
I’m still learning to come to terms with the reality that the people I love, the memories I cherish and the home I hold so dearly cannot stay the same, that it cannot be waiting for me forever.
This Diwali, I learnt to accept change and come to terms with the mourning and the loss that comes with change. But maybe that’s what Diwali is about – maybe my grandfather was right, Diwali isn’t limited to being the victory of good, the festival of light, Diwali could also be about finding the light in the shadows. Maybe it’s all about holding onto the love you have as long as you have it and to learn to cherish moments as much as possible, no matter how fleeting it all is.
Sia Jha Nath is a teenager.
