Never at Home

The city gives one the feeling of being at home.
We must take the feeling of being at home into exile.
We must be rooted in the absence of a place.

Simone Weil

I landed in Japan in 2004, a few decades of India behind me. I lived in Patiala, my hometown, moved to Hyderabad, Bangalore, Pune, Mumbai, brief stints in New Delhi and Chennai and finally returning to Bangalore before moving to Nagoya and then to Tokyo

Once I left my hometown it was difficult to accept any place as a home, there was something impermanent about every city I stayed in, whether it was for a few months or years.

Tokyo is the city I have lived the longest after my hometown. It took time to adapt to the city, to accept it and be accepted in return. There is the comfort of anonymity of a large city and there is also a parallel dissonance in standing out.
The city makes you faceless, it also reminds you that you have a face, different from others.

The city gives me a home but it also reminds me a home is not about belonging. In an increasingly nomadic world where there is a fluidity in defining belonging, it provides comfort in the lack of roots and a permanent detachment.

Travel is a vanishing act, a solitary down a pinched line of geography into oblivion.
But a travel book is the opposite , the loner bouncing back bigger than life to tell the story of his experiment with space.

Paul Theroux
The Old Patagonian Express

Patagonia is an apt reference here as it was the first travel book I read. The account of solitary travels through the wilds of Patagonia stirred a desire to travel and to write about it. Later, I would know that some part of that wonderful journal was embellished did not diminish it in any way.

The bug of travel was however still unknown, life was sedentary, the daily subway commute, an occasional weekend hile, and an annual trip to India, more duty than travel, were the limits of my world.

A few years down the line, when I began traveling for work, short, eventful trips with dazzling glimpses into cultures unknown, did the real experience start to dawn.

The came 2020 , a dizzy blur, what we thought was impossible became possible, dreams of travel turned into nightmares of not being able to travel. The utter stillness of everyday life and the disaster that was unfolding across the wold, the unknown fear and the fears of the unknown made me realise how I loved travel.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!

Alfred Tennyson ‘Ulysses’

This website started in 2020, when the world stopped in convulsions of fear and sitting in our cocoons, time in hand, fear in the heart and a longing for what seemed impossible, travel. What once brought us close, sickened us and the invisible enemy leaped over our connectedness and brought all to a still.

But travel did return, not with a vengeance, but in tiny sputters, starting and stopping and starting again. April 2023 was when all restrictions for travel to Japan were removed, I remember the feeling of exhilaration, at the Mumbai International Airport, at opening the app on my phone to fill in my travel details and a message popping up saying the input was no longer required. My gates out of Oran were finally open!

Writings from Japan

The sky lights up gently, slivers of colours, splintering and morphing into a vivid palette and giving way to the sunrise. The transformation is ever so delicate, colours forming in slow motion, hues of pink, purple, orange and finally fiery red, the apogee of natural beauty worth the wait.

Sunrise as seen from Mt Fuji is exhilarating . The breathless and sleepless climb through the night to the mountain top is rewarded by the spectacle seen at dawn. I stood at the top of Mt Fuji in 2021, the sunrise past a few hours and my family were the only visitors on the top. It seemed unrealistic, a popular destination for tourists almost deserted.

I came back in 2023, overseas travellers returning to Japan and once again stood at the same spot, with a few thousands climbers on one of the most crowded days ever and there was no doubt, travel was back.