It begins with a hum, ae mere pyaare watan, a tune that moves like memory and refuses instruction.
I was supposed to leave for Gwalior this week. A small train, a modest plan. Instead, I stayed in Delhi. The suitcase never left the corner, the platform never came into view. I have flown across continents for meetings that meant less. I have stitched time zones into my sleep and learned the grammar of departure boards. None of that hardness helps with this softer failure. The one journey that hollows me out is the one I did not take.
Delhi is where my mail goes. Gwalior is where my heart goes. I say this as if it settles something, but it only opens a deeper restlessness. In Delhi I am precise. The lift knows my floor, the sabziwala knows my impatience with unripe tomatoes, my keys behave. In Gwalior I am porous. A winter sun sits on a step it has always chosen, the breeze carries dust and cardamom, and the streets use my name like it still belongs to me.
For years I believed home might be a person. I kept a private definition: the day I could rest my head on someone’s shoulder and feel the old vigilance loosen, I would have arrived. That day did not come. Some shoulders went cold, some never learned the weight of me, some were never mine to trust. The belief dissolved, but the body remembers the idea. The little girl inside me still wanders with her tiffin and her questions, tugging my sleeve at every threshold, asking if this one might be safe enough to enter.
She has followed me everywhere. In airport security lines she counts the trays, palms open, trying to keep track of what we will get back. At immigration counters she stares at the officer’s stamp, as if a rectangle of ink could grant belonging. In rented apartments she sits by the door with the keys spread out like coins, testing each one in an invisible lock that will not turn. She is quieter now, but not convinced. When plans collapse, she is the first to understand what is lost.
I remind her that we have learned the world. I have walked in cities that rise like declarations, I have stood by oceans that promised a clean slate, I have eaten food with unfamiliar heat and found it good. She listens, but she is not impressed. She wants the simple thing: the tea that tastes right because my mouth remembers it, a bell that releases a schoolyard at four, a shopkeeper who refuses to change the price on a dusty shelf. She wants Gwalior, not as triumph, but as permission to be small again.
I tell myself a city is only geography. It is not. A city is a ledger of unphotographed details. The hook your hand finds without looking. The chair you drag closer to the window because light needs help finding your face. The two streets where your pace always slows. The rooms that forget your name but remember how morning walked across the floor. By that measure, Gwalior is still mine, and I am still its child.
This week I did not go. The fort kept its posture without me. The morning practice warmed other rooms. Somewhere, a riyaz found a note and held it steady. Absence is not neutral. It corrodes. It silts into the corners of a day and makes even ordinary tasks heavy. My apartment received me faithfully, the plants produced new leaves, the cupboards matched their contents, and yet the place felt staged, as if I were practicing my life rather than living it.
If home is safety, then I am still in transit. If home is where your ghosts refuse to leave, then Gwalior has me completely. It does not demand reinvention. It does not ask for proof. It does not bargain. It simply waits. There is a cruelty in that patience. The city would take me back. I could not go.
I have two addresses and one body. One city keeps my keys. The other keeps the girl I lost and will not release her until I learn how to carry her without apology. We do not outgrow our first city. We learn to bear its weight differently. Some distances harden. Some distances hollow. This one does both.
On the form where it says permanent address, I write Delhi, because forms insist on a single answer. In the small white space that is not for writing, I add Gwalior, not as location, but as gravity and grief.
And even now, when the day goes quiet, the song returns. Not as comfort, not as proof, only as insistence: ae mere pyaare watan. The city does not ask where I have been. It does not ask why I did not come. It asks if I am hungry, and the little girl beside me, still watchful, still hopeful, answers before I do.