It’s been three years since I moved to Dublin, leaving my hometown while it slept still at 4am in the morning, in a white taxi that took me to the tiny airport. All of my 18 years of life packed away in two 25 kg bags and a small smile on my face. It didn’t hurt then to leave, because I was flying over to something that would bring me closer to my dreams. And it didn’t hurt a month into this big move when I had no friends but only a small and close to empty dorm. It also didn’t hurt a year into the move when Diwali rolled around and I learned to wear a sari in the now slightly-full dorm with the help of 3 YouTube videos that were played on .25 speed. It doesn’t hurt now as I sit here writing about home. And this made me confident I wasn’t one to be as homesick. And I do believe I’m not. Not in the way my friends had experienced and cried about, not in the way that made them book tickets back for the first winter break days into college, and not in the way that would make me write about it. I guess that happens when you have a complicated relationship with home and hometown.
But every once in a while I miss something, it comes in a fast moment of a cold run to class, the wind breaking against my pink puffer jacket and my tote bag pulling down at one shoulder that’s sore from it. It’s strong and bright and undeniable then. It’s often some quiet day when the sun shines on the white, blue and faded orange tiles of my balcony and the laughter rings in the memory of me and my mother who sat there eating our breakfast, a plate of Poha. It’s dry, spicy and yellow. Too yellow. It tastes of turmeric, and I’m making a face. The sun glistens against the window behind us that looks into my childhood bedroom, which in this vision is untouched by renovations and time. And the only stress that looms is of the one page of homework that needs to be completed and the school bag that needs to be packed, all of which my mother will help with. I hear her soft voice over the loud Dublin wind. The vision of this comes and goes in seconds, and leaves me still and then seconds later FaceTiming my mother frantically.
It’s homesickness and it’s not. It’s missing home and it’s not. It’s wanting to be back there but not.
I fly back to my hometown sometimes, over the summer, each time with the hope of finding myself in the same moments I have visions of and the same moments I wake up from dreams of on cold mornings where I snuggle into my floral throw from Penneys. But when I do, I only ever find the same reasons that made it easy to leave my hometown behind. This strange feeling eats away at me. It’s homesickness and it’s not. It’s missing home and it’s not. It’s wanting to be back there but not. Hard to understand it. It’s hard to process or talk about. And I’ve read of homesickness that international students experience and I’ve written about it too. But none like this? What of this kind that fills me with yearning so intense it’s sharp? What do you do when it’s too sharp? What do you do when the vision doesn’t fade in seconds but stays with you all day even after that FaceTime and that summer of searching for it back in India? What do you do then?
You sit on the black plastic chair and you look out at the city of Dublin where you’ve built a beautiful life for yourself and you take a bite and finally you are back in the moment that you have yearned for and looked for, for three years now.
You get off at Westmoreland Luas stop. Then, you go into the Indian grocery store on your way back from college and you take the food that fills your tote bag and put it down carefully on the counter of your small shared dorm room kitchen and you pull up a YouTube video with Sanjeev Kapoor in his open garden telling you a detailed recipe, and you follow it to a T, except for the small changes that your mother taught you, and then you put it on a white Ikea plate and you take it to the balcony. Then you sit on the black plastic chair and you look out at the city of Dublin where you’ve built a beautiful life for yourself and you take a bite and finally you are back in the moment that you have yearned for and looked for, for three years now. It’s what you do and when you do you find everything that a plate of Poha can hold. The same Poha you cringed to find for breakfast growing up. The same you swore to never make when you were all grown up and had a home and a kitchen of your own.
Food has a way of providing a comfort for clarity and takes you to that one thing you’re missing but can’t talk about.
As I ate that plate of Poha I realised what I was feeling was different than homesickness, or missing my mom, or missing at all. It was the complicated experience of leaving your childhood behind with your hometown and the yearning you’re bound to feel in the absence of. It still doesn’t make sense when I try to put it into words. But I have finally processed it, the yearning is finally satisfied, and maybe I won’t go looking for it everywhere and annoy my mother with a million FaceTimes in the middle of her working hours. Food has a way of providing a comfort for clarity and takes you to that one thing you’re missing but can’t talk about. It fills you to the brim with the memory of it. Food holds more than just nutrition and feeds more than just your body. Sometimes it feeds the small hole in your heart in the shape of something you can’t make out.
So maybe if you’re choking in the memory of something, of somewhere, and your emotions are too hard to understand, play one of Sanjeev Kapoor’s recipes on YouTube and follow them step by step. The plate at the end of it may hold more than just Poha.
