Of homes, and hearts, misplaced minds and monkey brains.

Familiar sounds and familiar smells, the same sounds you grew up with, head on a pillow in the room you were last in when you were one. A sprig of flowers through the window barred when you began to walk by paranoid grandparents who call you by embarrassing names. The white noise of the television blaring in a language you only half understand. Weather you are unaccustomed to, the cold floor surprising, and sharp gusts of wind confusing. The same slightly sour curd, the spice of pickled mangoes that cuts through your tongue, the satisfaction reminding you of where you come from, where you originally come from. The ancient creaking fan throwing blurry shadows on the wall, questions that you’ve answered, answered again for the aged, and the forgetful and the concerned. Books you haven’t seen in two years, faded and comfortably brown at the edges, fading with dignity, the words still retaining their potency and unraveling with more meaning since the last time you read them.
Reminding you of places where you used to live, with the garishly-coloured dragons on the walls, cream walls and colonial furniture – an eight-seater teak dining table but only three people in the house. Playing football in the dining room, fearfully walking on the roof to check the water level in the tank. A tin roof, and it felt like bullets and shrapnel during air raids when it rained. Flowers made out of eggshells for the convent sisters who taught craft thrice a week at the convent school with a chapel amidst neon flowers in front of the playground, where young heads had the story of Christ so ingrained in them that come November, games would center around the re-imagining of the Nativity scene, little girls in pinafores fighting over who gets to be the Virgin Mary, the more brutish of the group fighting over who gets to be the rascal innkeeper who refused shelter to the mother of the boy who would grow up to the Saviour (How dare he). Slides on sand, classrooms with teachers who wore long skirts and kept their hair short, tongues wagging in the strangely nasal Nepali, losing your way to Hindi class. Wooden benches too cold in the winter, three months of holidays with parties still hung-over with the British influence. Watching Sabrina the Teenage Witch and eating meringue, being only half-asleep in the other room when you parents come home too tipsy on champagne, falling over furniture in the master bedroom with the light green bedspread. The cold which spaceman jackets helped overcome. Blankets with dragons and curly wisps of smoke.
Blankets here have floral patterns, almost tropical, so sunny, with none of the royalness that their hilly counterparts have. In the end though, they serve the same purpose. They keep you warm and remind you of home, and when you’re far far away and you are made acutely aware of the yawning chasm that separates you from home, they also serve as a makeshift womb in which you can curl in, like a little foetus, hoping for time-travel.