I started my journey there. And somewhere deep inside me, I hope to wrap it up there too — just like my parents did, and their parents before them.

That is the only thing I know for certain.

In our village, a banyan tree stands at the heart of everything. Nobody knows who planted it or when. There is no record, no story passed down. It was simply always there — before my father, before his father, before his father’s father. It existed before memory, and it will exist long after mine fades too.

Around its base is a raised concrete platform. People sit there to talk, to rest, sometimes just to exist without purpose. There is a Vinayagar stone tucked nearby, worn smooth by years of quiet prayers. Village decisions were made under those branches — disputes settled, plans drawn, grief shared, celebrations announced.

I grew up a half-hour walk from that tree. Past the elementary school, past the farms. Almost everyone in our village farmed. We did too. Life was uncomplicated in the way that only becomes clear to you much later, from very far away.


I left in my early 30s. Canada called, and I answered without hesitation. Back then, I was certain I would not look back — not really. Family visits, yes. But return? No. I had made my choice and I was at peace with it.

That was more than twenty years ago.

I am in my mid-50s now. Canada gave me a good life. I embraced it fully and I have no regrets about that. But something shifted along the way, a feeling I cannot name.

I miss my village.

Not the people, not the relatives — that would be easier to understand. I miss the place. The essence of it. Something that has no address and cannot be photographed. Something that does not exist in any version of the village I could actually return to today, because the village I miss lives only inside me, in a time that is already gone.


The banyan tree is still there. I know this.

Somewhere right now, someone is sitting on that concrete platform. Maybe scrolling a phone — the world has changed even there. But they are still under the tree. They always end up under the tree. That has not changed, and I find something quietly reassuring in that.

The tree does not know I left. It is doing what it has always done — standing, spreading, sheltering, witnessing. It watched my great-grandfather grow old. It watched my grandfather. It watched my father. It watched me take my first uncertain steps into the world.

And it is still watching. Just not me. Not yet.


When I think of home — and I mean home, not a house or a city or even a country — the first image that comes is not a face. It is that tree. The particular quality of light through its canopy. The smell of the earth around it after rain. The low murmur of people who have nowhere better to be and no urgency to go anywhere.

I have tried to understand what I am missing. I cannot grasp it. Every time I reach for it, it slips away. It is not nostalgia exactly. It is not grief. It is not longing in any simple sense of the word.

It is a haunting enigma. Something unnamed, sitting quietly at the edge of my thoughts, leaving me strangely unfulfilled in a life that by every measure is full.

I do not know what it is.

Maybe that is the point. Some things resist explanation. Some feelings are not meant to be solved, only carried.


A banyan tree grows by sending roots downward from its branches. New roots become new trunks. It expands outward, becomes its own forest, holds itself up from within. You can walk into a banyan tree and find yourself surrounded, enclosed, held — without ever having noticed when you stepped inside.

I think about that sometimes.

I left the village. I built a life. I put down roots on the other side of the world. And yet some part of me never fully left that platform, never stopped sitting in that shade, never stopped being the child who walked past the farms every morning with a school bag and no understanding of how much that ordinary walk would come to mean.

I started my journey there.

I hope, when the time comes, to end it there too.

The tree will still be standing. It always is.