There must be a way for me to tell you about my here and now without it sounding like a brag, without it seeming insensitive, without coming across as though I was consciously setting out to elicit your envy. I have been absent from social media because I don’t know what to make of my life away from where you are, especially in the face of so much calamity, so much tenuousness, such colossal grief. Seconds after I unlocked the door to my apartment in Venice, on the third floor of a guest house in Castello, I retrieved my phone from my bag and panicked at the sight of a missed call from my darling friend and ex-flatmate, Simar, from Delhi. I froze for a second, then tried promptly to call back. I felt in my body the same dread that has been following me for weeks wherever I go, the very same angst I had felt all day in my veins two weeks before, when I had come to Venice with my partner. We were excited to soak in the luxury of an empty San Marco square, to be the only six or eight people at the cathedral and finally encounter the legendary mosaics first-hand, not behind a sea of other visitors. On our last evening together I heard not-so-good news from my sister, which made me panic for my brother. I tried to reassure myself that he was in Dubai, which was already a best-case scenario.

Mercifully, Simar was calling to brainstorm about a work project and my despair quickly transformed into joy... an unbridled elation on account of feeling needed by her. We spoke about home, what it means to be in this moment when you may be home but you cannot visit your other homes. For months I have been repeating to myself these words by Simone Weil, who must have lived them, especially on the cusp of having to leave her familiar worlds to escape the Nazis. “We must take the feeling of being at home into exile. We must be rooted in the absence of a place.” This line, a stray thought among a constellation of profound insights, has felt comforting, because it offers a roadmap for negotiating the complexities that mark our present. “It is necessary to uproot oneself. To cut down the tree and make of it a cross, and then to carry it every day.”