“There’s nothing half so pleasant as coming home again.”
-Margaret Elizabeth Sangster
As the ground rushed forward to meet the landing plane, the last 24 hours flashed past me in a jumble of blurry pictures; last-minute packing, a harried drive from Horsham to Melbourne Airport, two international flights, cramped quarters in the economy class, whiny kids, mind-numbing transit angst........was I glad that the travel was nearing its end !!!
I sigh in glorious relief to find the use of my legs again.
Air-travel is one of my pet peeves – nothing like the monotony of a long international flight with the added torture of airline food to put me in a bad mood....even the Singapore slings (the ritzy cocktail specials served by Singapore Airlines) that I had taken a fancy to during this trip did little to cheer me up or lighten the dull pallor of travel weariness that hung around me like a shroud.
Hastily I cut short my daydreams of teleporting for my next travel and drag my wearied bones through the spartan but atleast clean building that resembles more a bus depot than a major international airport. The family has just landed in the south of India, where we will be spending the next three weeks visiting family and friends after almost four years since our last trip to India.
As the family and I quickly run through immigration with our Australian passports, I refuse to meet the eyes of the domestic passport holders standing in the long and slow-moving queues. Something akin to betrayal slightly eats at me and I feel like a persona non grata entering the country. This is a feeling that I am unable to shirk off lately - is it just me or does every expatriate feel the same way when they hit their home stretch with a different passport?
Curbing my longing to compare notes with other expats, I quietly reflect on what impels these migrants to come home – like migrating geese on a set course, most of us make trips to our originating countries every few years expending not just our saved up leave but our savings as well. Take an Indian toiling in the oil fields in Kuwait, an Iraqi kebab stall owner in Sweden, an Italian charity worker in Ghana, a Lebanese professor in Canada - one common bond that these various people most likely share is their affinity to visit their home countries once the word holiday crops up.
So what is that we, expatriates, yearn for and hope to achieve out of these trips? Do these homecoming trips provide us the satisfaction and pleasure that we expect and desire? Caught between two cultures, do any of us miss the luxury or the life in the adopted countries that we are used to while making these trips? The answers to these questions are not simple or straightforward – each one’s experience of their trip is a story in itself.
--- To be continued
This post will hold a special place in my heart as it is my first post as a column-writer in the local newspaper !!!!
