I still vividly recall giving handwritten letters to each of my family members who came to drop me off at the Cochin Airport. I was hugging them so tight and turning back at least 3 times while I was walking away, each time a negotiation with gravity, as if looking long enough could rewind the moment. They say moving ahead is about momentum, the forward thrust of ambition and becoming. But there are also many costs that come with it. The pain of leaving everything you know and love behind is doubtlessly heart-wrenching. But the universe has a way of balancing things out. With the negatives , also comes the positives.
And then I arrived at Krea University, an unwritten poem carved in Sri City, a home away from home. Not the same home, but a home nonetheless. The hot bread omelette and cold coffee at H and C doesn’t fill you in the way home cooked meals do, but it fills you differently- with the routine of going with your friends, with small rituals that stitch days together and with the knowledge that you’ve learned now how to feed yourself, quite literally and otherwise.Â
The perimeter walks are the redemption in all of this. I’ve walked these paths with friends who, like me, feel homesick yet know that moving ahead doesn’t always mean moving alone. The sun rises here the same way it does back home, the golden rays hitting us while we all walk behind one another, like a train, oblivious to all things that adulthood brings with it. There’s something sacred about witnessing sunrise with people who chose the same uncertain path as you did. There’s something that feels like home in that very choosing, together.Â
Onam came this year too, like it does every year. I just wasn’t home to witness it. All the events and activities at Krea and the constant hum of becoming got me forgetting to call home on the very day my mother would have expected my voice. The guilt of that forgetting still sits with me. But as usual, Krea did something that changed the weight of that guilt into something lighter. The university opened its arms and created Onam here; a whole day filled with a mesmerizing pookalam, Malayalam movies, Sadhya, drum procession and the kind of celebration that doesn’t erase the one at home but somehow reminds you that joy isn’t scarce. That the universe doesn’t ask you to choose between where you are coming from and where you’re going.
I think this is what they don’t tell you , when you pack your life into 2 suitcases to move ahead in life:
The cost isn’t subtraction. Its transformation.Â
Yes, I gave up sitting cross legged with my family on the floor to eat Sadhya on a banana leaf. Yes, there’s a specific ache in missing your mom’s hand cooked meals and her shoulder that’s always there to lean on. Yes, there’s the ache of missing the daily ritual of fighting over the last cookie or chocolate with your siblings and the loss of a four-legged, tail wagging being.
But moving ahead also gives you this :-
It gives you 5 am cold coffee with friends under a sky that’s learning to feel familiar. It gives you opportunities, diversity, various festivals, and people you can call home away from home. It gives you the perimeter walk; those sacred hours before the world wakes, where you learn who you are and who you’re becoming without your family’s hand steadying you.Â
The ledger is complicated now, and I think that’s the real thing about growth.
I won’t try balancing it into columns where gain equals loss. I’ve realized that’s not how moving ahead works. But what I know for sure is this – Every goodbye at The Cochin Airport bought me a new hello on the perimeter walks. Every missed Onam at home is now paid for with an Onam where strangers became friends and family. The cost of moving ahead in life is real and it stays with you. But remember, so do the perks.
I am writing this from Sri City, on a campus that’s now learned my name. I am drinking cold coffee that tastes like my own becoming. And in Kerala, my family is still there, closer than they’ve ever been to me, because now I know, truly, the price of distance.Â
And it was worth it. Not because I gained something more valuable, but because now I’m larger. Large enough to carry both. Â