Very soon I will be going on my vacation. But this year it is different. I will be going to West bengal, my home state. Though I was just born there but still that small itch to say that part of the country home is there. Categorically speaking I am homeless. Spent my childhood in UP where I came after spending years in Bangalore and Delhi. When in school father used to take us home on a long vacation in the summers, but then it was just another day in my life nothing special. Things changed when I went to college and I developed the habit of reading or started seeing the world outside the cocoon I grew up while living with my parents. I felt though I have spent the most of my life outside that state but my home is there. I am alien in this place, though well accepted in the folds of this society but somewhere deep inside a sense of alienation was there. Initially I used to tell my father lets go and settle in Calcutta(now Kolkata), he used to say no I will live where my father used to live thats Barddhaman. Now I understand why is it so. I am just a bong who spent his childhood in UP and spent the summers in West Bengal. But my father was born and brought up in Barddhaman. All his childhood memories has its association to that place. Left home at 17 he made a life for himself and after 33 long years he went back to that very place where he had his tryst with sand and soil. Today I am trying to get somewhere out of this country to earn my livelihood or rather I am forced to. Well why that would be another story. But the fear that torments me is where it is that I would call home. I left home when I was 17 to pursue what you call higher studies. Eleven years down the lane and I already feel tired, longing to spread my legs on a veranda sipping coconut water or strolling down the cheap book stores of Kolkata looking for a bargain or eagerly waiting for the moglai paratha on a road side stall. For the first time in my life I feel like I want to go home.
