The Odyssey
I. The Questioning
Olmstead Point, Yosemite Valley
What is home, after all of these years? I hear the faint lullaby of white noise in the background: the laughter on the television, an echo of Mamu and Daddy's conversation over a cup of chia. Those days were so long ago, though they feel like yesterday: the aroma of Ama’s dal that I long for in hindsight, in between the fresh doughnuts we shared on our walks from the temple. In those days, when I discreetly slipped my cup of milk down the bathroom drain, did I foresee a lifetime of secrecy?
I rest in the illusions I have crafted, the definitions that are inevitable versus those that could have been. Sometimes, I have no choice but to split my identity in two: an identity formed for others to consume, alongside the one I bashfully embrace. In the spirit of my dishonesty, I fall for the poetry of those midsummer rides to Chambers Street to see him — and I find home in the conversations that form our secret love affair. Home becomes the turquoise mountains we forge our story under.
I am a captive to nostalgia’s treachery, a victim to the moments inevitably distorted by time. I used to dream of uncharted territories ahead. Where those days have faded into the adrenaline of transient joy, I long for the boredom of stability. So I recede.
Home is the realm of exile, where I am torn between the comfort of the known and the lure of the unknown. In that tension, my odyssey often begins.
II. The Phantom
Annapurna Base Camp Trek, Nepal
The journey forces me to consider if I am condemned to be the casualty of displacement. Displacement runs through generations, though it takes different forms. My father's exile is into memory while mine is into departure. I learn this shortly after reuniting with him at the innocent age of seven.
He returns, even more than I do, to dal bhat tarkari. It isn’t the dish as much as it is the sentimentality of his nostalgia. The senses aroused in that one experience is now his only entryway into a lost time. And the memory comes flooding in: the memory of those days, when I had believed it was a battle worth waging that Angrezi food is not subpar against the tarkari he longed for.
Do you ever wonder how two people can cohabitate the same space, but exist in different planes? How can we hold the conviction of a shared language, but float in different interpretations? In our most defining moments, our dialectic did not exist in a vacuum. It was a summoning of the imagination carved by our unique memories. That is why the dal marked for my father the kajal of Ama's eyes. The softness of her skin. The vermillion on her forehead. The memory, reawakened in her absence, came alive in the sensory awakening of a simple taste. What appeared an aromatic dish to an outside observer was the only milestone that had yet to abandon him in the passing of time. And he would tell me, when I fried garlic for a marinara, to run the pressure cooker alongside it with dal. Why can't you just appreciate what I am making for you, Daddy? I would cry.
This is the curse of our dialectic. I carry an umbrella but it isn't raining. And my father is on the train into his past. He is trying to find the moment he was forsaken by the sunlight. And so he retreats, his memory now his only sanctuary. And I become a phantom as he approaches the time before I was born.
III. The Homecoming
.Kumarigal, Nepal
Return arrives slowly, after seventeen years of quiet unraveling.
I wonder why I spent all those years chasing phantoms, why I found home in the mountains, why I could never quite see eye to eye with my father's grief. Until I return to the place I had sworn I would never leave behind. In that reconvergence with reality, I see my fantasy reflected before me in the image of my childhood home.
Homecoming is a poignant act. Dreams reveal themselves as memories in disguise. I think about my happiest memories and how they, too, carry an undertone of melancholy, because a moment, once it is lost, can never be felt again for the first time. I think about my Ama's laughter and how it lit up the spaces that feel smaller now that I no longer have my childish body to occupy them. I think about how I have become a stranger in the places I still consider sacred — and how all that unites me with my childhood home is its architectural integrity and the residue of peeling paint.
There is so much that is invisible to the naked eye. There is the pride in my grandfather's eyes when he sees the person I have become. There is his love that I dreamed of for seventeen years, though I had somehow forgotten. There is his bashful laughter at my carefree ways. And beneath it all, there is an identity imprisoned by the heavy heart of leaving. It finds hope in the act of returning, though it wonders if it is too late. When it comes to matters of homecoming, there are no definitive answers.
IV. The Reconciliation
Annapurna Base Camp Trek, Nepal
I think about the moment I left, when I told my grandmother I would never let her go, and see one year stretch into seventeen. I wasn’t there to see her grow old. In my absence, all that persevered was the grease of mustard oil on the walls from years of cooking dal bhat tarkari.
There are time capsules Ama left behind as remnants of her love: the asymmetrical photographs on the wall of my father and I. There are the golden earrings she entrusted to my grandfather for the day her granddaughter would return from America, knowing she might not be there to place them in my hands herself.
On his bedside table, my grandfather keeps photographs of me. For years, he could have chosen any symbol to greet his mornings. When he devotes his every day to becoming closer to god, he chose my childish smile to wake up to for almost two decades. That, perhaps, is reconciliation: to realize the magnitude with which you are remembered, even in absence.
For years, I carried displacement like a phantom. Only here, as I watch clouds drifting from my terrace, do I understand why I long for the valleys. My seemingly innocent desires are rooted in a nostalgia that my body remembers, even as my mind had fallen victim to forgetting. That memory opens everywhere. In the dust and incense of Kathmandu’s streets. In the unpredictability of a city that remakes itself each day. In the residue of the dal that once bloomed with spices in this very kitchen. These are the remnants I carry in the war against forgetting, reminders that there is always a reason to return.
Maybe one day, my father will finally make peace with his past. He may return to find the life he has yet to live. In this odyssey, my dear, he will say, every reconciliation is provisional. Every return, a departure.