Night Without End

Time flies fast.

It seems only yesterday that I put up the last post sitting here at the Helsinki Vantaa International Airport while headed for India. And here I am back again, this time headed for the US.

The last one month seems like a dream now. The one month that I spent with my parents and my sister after spending sixteen months away from home. One month without making my own bed, doing my own laundry, washing my own dishes or sweeping my own floor. One month of enjoying the cold weather sitting indoors wrapped under a shawl (and the Indian winter didn’t let me down this time), a month of free incoming calls on my cellphone and a month with several lunch and dinner invitations where you eat licking your fingers and not struggle with a knife and a fork. All that and more seemed to fly by at the speed of light and here I am headed back to the US again.

Indians living in the US often spell out the things they get in that country that they don’t get in India. What they conveniently choose to ignore is how much they miss in the land of the free. During the last month I became aware of how much I love my country despite all her problems (and there are many, no denying that fact). But more of that later. At the moment I am not able to organize my thoughts mainly because this journey is taking too long.

I started on this journey at 12:30pm on Friday. We reached the Kolkata airport around 2:00. My flight to Delhi left at 5:30 and reached Delhi around 8:00. Then there was the bus ride from the domestic terminal to the International one. After having a hearty dinner on the luchi, alubhaja and sandesh packed by my mom, I proceeded to spend the night half awake on a chair guarding two suitcases and a backpack. By next morning I was already stiff, and the real journey had not yet started.

My next plane left Delhi at 10:30am on Saturday and reached Helsinki when it was 6:00pm in India and 2:30pm here. Since then I have been trying to survive in this airport where a small sandwich costs around $10. It’s around 8:30 in the morning now and it’s still dark here – it became dark at 4:30 last evening. I have to wait till 2:00pm to board my next flight to JFK.

Time flies fast. Unless you are on a journey.