Member-only story
TRAVEL MEMOIRS
The Pursuit to Find Home
Home is where the heart is
I first came to New York City when I was ten years old. Jetlagged after an eighteen-hour flight from India, I fell asleep on the tour bus. When my eyes opened, we were in front of the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street. Cars were allowed on that street back then. Little did I know that I would be a lawyer in New York, living on that very same street in a few decades.
Not all of us are illegal immigrants who came to America to cause harm. Some of us fell in love with a new city we stumbled upon. When I lost my childhood home, a piece of my heart disappeared. All I could do was keep moving until I found a new city that restored fragments of what I thought I had lost forever.
I was thirteen when my parents decided to uproot me from Delhi and move back to their hometown of Kolkata. I was unhappy about the relocation, but had no choice but to go along. As the faces and scenery around me changed, I never stopped searching for another place that could give me that familiar sense of belonging.
If you, like me, have moved away from where you were raised, you understand the feeling of packing up and leaving, knowing that some things will never be the same again.
