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 exile. It is a place of paradox, where I am torn between the comfort of the known and the lure of the unknown, where I am both prisoner and wanderer. Every return feels provisional. Every departure feels permanent. And in that tension, my odyssey begins.
II. The Phantom
Annapurna Base Camp Trek, Nepal
Time passes and forces me to consider: Is this all I am condemned to be? The casualty of displacement.
Displacement runs through generations, though it takes different shapes. My father’s exile is into memory; mine is into departure. He returns, again and again, 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. I had gotten the story all wrong.
What was the story?
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 brown 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 basil 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 that time chasing phantoms — why I found home in the mountains, why the layers of mist seeping through the valleys filled me with a sensation I could not name. Until I return to the place I had sworn I would never leave behind. And in this 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 — and my relentless pursuit of the unknown, I realize now, was a desire to return to a time that was promised only once. 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 grandmother'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, only the quiet knowledge that exile and return always yearn for each other.
IV. The Reconciliation
Annapurna Base Camp Trek, Nepal
After seventeen years, I return to the place where time stands still. I recall those breezy summer nights, before I had an identity to call my own. In the moment of our goodbye, when I swore I would never let her go, one year stretched into seventeen.
I wasn’t there to see her grow old. In my absence, I preserved her youth, until the day I climbed those familiar marble steps and found her no longer there.
There are time capsules she left behind as remnants of her love: the asymmetrical photographs on the wall that settle even my perfectionistic heart. 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 loneliness like a hollowing. Only here, watching clouds drift into the ridges from my terrace, do I begin to understand why I long for the valleys. Why I find freedom on the back of a motorcycle. As I observe the distant rolling hills of the Himalayas, I realize that 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 my little sister’s laughter breaking the air during a last sunset in Boudha. In the scooter rides across Patan, arms wrapped around a body that may have belonged to fantasy. These are the remnants I carry in the war against forgetting, reminders that there is always a reason to return.
Sometimes, you return to reconcile your past. Sometimes you return to find all of the life you have yet to live. Every reconciliation is provisional. Every return, a departure.