Home.

“The children playing at skittles on the hot road, some of them throwing stones at the trees to fetch mangoes,the sky seeming to shimmer in the heat and humidity.. poetry oozing from every pore of the city in its dilapidated, sepia tinted beauty. Rickshaws gaping open with their pullers sleeping in the shade of the sea, a barber on the street with a small, handheld mirror,a few beggars with inimitable joie de vivre, running up resolutely to people to ask for food or money.. Dogs who looked as happy as the people and just as worn out as them. Wonderfully interesting faces wherever one happened to look. This, this was home. It had always been home. I had never known. Never understood that one could find home in a place where one barely spent more than three days at a time. But it was, somehow. I belonged here more than I had belonged anywhere else, at any other time. I would live here. Live and die here. This beauty, with its cloak of golden nostalgia, it would never let me go. And I would surrender all of myself happily here. Here, here I would fall in love, here break my heart, and here learn to hold my head up again and stand on my own two feet. Here I would know myself. This was my city.”