4 posts tagged “home”

I think I told a lot of people that I might be coming home for a few days in May beginning...

Now it looks like it's not happening... I AM sad...

However, on a different (happy) note, we finally have found a house -- and so far so good -- we plan to move in by May wk1/wk2.

Last few days I've been missing my country in ways that I'd never thought I would.

Obviously, there's the food part. I never thought I'd actually long for the typical Bangladeshi food, the simple daal-bhaat, chhoto maachh, or khichuri and beef bhuna --  last night my wife was asking me why I can't have the plain steamed rice and the daal from the hotel, to satiate my longing for daal-bhaat. I knew better -- it's not about the food, it's about home and having it in Bangladesh and everything -- none of which can be replicated by simply trying to replicate the food.

Yesterday afternoon while coming back from the foreigners' registration office, I found myself humming the national anthem and was so surprised to hear myself doing it. Then I knew how it got me. The other day I watched this movie and at the start of the movie they were playing the Indian national anthem Jana Gana Mana. It had come to my mind that the same person (the Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore) was the author of both the Bangladesh national anthem and the Indian one. Probably from that point our own anthem was floating around somewhere in the subconscious. When I found myself humming the tune, the lyrics came to my mind, word by word and stanza after stanza; and I realized that it's my country I was missing, at that point of time, probably more than my family or any one person.

Why won't I? When I go to work, even the buildings look unfriendly to me. I don't really know the language enough to speak with confidence, and even if I did it sounds so much more harsh than Bengali -- even if you rule out the coarseness of the Bombay-style mishmash Hindi. I look at the roads and they are actually dirtier than my hometown -- and I chide myself why I would complain so much about its uncleanliness while I was there.

There are a couple of Bengalis in my office but unless they speak it first, I try not to speak the language. I've noticed that they don't prefer to use the language that much even among themselves -- but I guess even back in my Bangladesh office we used to speak in English a lot amongst ourself and obviously it's rude to for two people to engage in a conversation in a language that's not understood by most of the surrounding people. Even then, I've noticed there are one or two who actually switch to Bengali whenever they talk to me -- but as I said, one or two.

Is this homesickness? Don't know? Maybe, maybe not. I'm yet to miss my own home big time. But this much I'm sure, it's homeland-sickness.

Had a good trip -- short but quite nice. The next few days will be awfully hectic; so will post probably after that...