Finding Me Again, part 1 published

Trisha pottered around the kitchen speaking into her cell. “You won’t believe how much we enjoyed Vegas. We went to Grand Canyon for a day from there. Ashok took the mule ride all the way down to the Canyon bed. e He To tell you the truth, I found it a bit scary.” Trisha rambled on with her friend Rina, for what seemed like an eternity, shuffling around the kitchen in her soft slippers and frumpy housecoat.

“No, I won’t be able to go with you to Target today. I am going out with Ashok. Please pick up something nice for Shukti’s house warming party,” she said checking her Facebook account, a scowl forming on her face. She had at least a hundred friends on Facebook, but there were only sixteen “likes” for her carefully posted Vegas trip pictures and almost no comments. “Okay, I will see you tonight at shukti’s.”

Trisha was one of the most active members of the Bengali Association of Chicago. She attended the pujas, the religious and cultural gatherings round the year and enthusiastically injected new faces in the celebrations, every now and then. She was the helpful kind, receiving phone calls from Bengali families moving into Chicago, with a range of queries. They would have acquired her phone number from some other Bengali family they most probably ran into at Devon or Schaumburg, the South Asian neighborhoods teeming with Indian grocery stores. You need a realtor, one who would understand your constraints… talk to her. Chicago schools are a maze. You need someone who can guide you through it…call her. She helped innumerable families find their way around Chicago.

She had left Kolkata, the city she was born and raised in, twenty years ago to join her husband in Chicago. She had futilely tried to convince herself over the years that the yearning she felt for Kolkata, would alleviate with time and she will get used to it, but the truth was that she still missed her city every day.

Her husband was a practical man. Ashok was not sentimental about things and people he had left behind in India. When she had tried telling him initially, how she missed her city, Ashok offered her hope that one day she would come to love Chicago as much, that she should give it some time. He said it with such conviction that she felt that he would never want to move back to India.

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