The Different Worlds We Leave

I always find it strange—how we live in different worlds without even realizing it.

When I leave Delhi and go back home, it feels like stepping into an old, familiar movie. The roads, the familiar voices, the routine that once shaped my days—they all greet me like I never left. My room is the same. My mother fusses over how thin I’ve become, my father asks the same old questions, and the neighborhood shopkeeper smiles knowingly as if marking my return.

For a few days, I slip back into this world effortlessly. I wake up to home-cooked food, sit in the balcony where I once daydreamed about the life I now live, and move through spaces that carry echoes of my childhood. Everything here moves at its own unhurried pace, making me wonder if I ever truly belonged to the rush of the city.

But then, just as suddenly, I pack my bags and leave again. The moment I unlock the door of my Delhi room, it’s like my other world has been waiting for me. My books lie open where I left them, my half-drunk cup of tea now dry, the chair slightly pulled back—as if frozen in time, waiting for me to return and pick up where I left off.

Life resumes. The calls, the deadlines, the metro rides. I slip into this world just as easily as I slipped out of the other. It’s almost funny how two versions of me exist—one at home, where I am someone’s child, and one here, where I am just another person in a city that never stops moving.

And yet, neither world fully leaves me. When I’m home, I think of Delhi—of the chaos, the independence, the late-night study sessions. And when I’m in Delhi, I think of home—the slow mornings, the warmth, the people who always wait for me.

Maybe that’s just how life is. We don’t belong to just one place. We carry pieces of every world we’ve ever lived in, moving between them, leaving and returning, again and again.

And in the end, perhaps, we never truly leave. A part of us always lingers, waiting for us to come back.

See you another day. Goodbye. Have a good life.