Leaving my family felt like the hardest thing I’ve had to do in the last few months. Unlike during the pandemic, I was blessed with the opportunity to spend time with them, hug them goodbye and experience the closure of a farewell. But that didn’t make it any easier. I didn’t want to let go of my mother and my father. I was already wishing I had more time with my sister. She was emotional and teary-eyed. I seemed calm and composed, but on the inside, I was already sensing the pangs of not knowing when I would see them all again. ‘Come visit us,’ I said in vain, knowing that the journey to where we live can feel daunting. We took a flight from Goa to Dubai, stayed one night there so we could rest, then, the next evening, we took the flight to Bergamo. We arrived at 10.30 pm, too late to commence the train journey back to Tramin. Anticipating this, we had already booked a hotel room so we could crash and begin the final leg freshly bathed and caught up on sleep. Indeed, the next morning, we savoured our complimentary breakfast and made our way, arriving in Tramin in time for lunch at 1.30 pm.

It’s in moments like these between ports of departure and arrival and the in-between transit zones that I feel forced to acknowledge exactly how far away I am from all the homes and families that I have built and known all my life. It’s not like living in Berlin or Paris, cities that are easy to reach, with many connecting flight options, where a return trip is a simple airport ride away. I live in this tiny town in the Italian Alps and as I glimpsed at how it was nestled within the Etsch valley as the train pulled up towards our station, I felt bewildered by how lushly green everything appeared. The little rain we’d received the day we were leaving and a few times after had sufficed to transform the landscape. For the first time since I moved here three years ago, I felt the relief of returning, of feeling like I was ‘back home’, even though I was already missing the other homes: my brothers’ apartment in Dubai; my bestie’s apartment in Delhi, our home in Goa; and I didn’t even dare to think about Mumbai because we couldn’t put it on our itinerary.