Photo Taken of me outside my birth home in New Delhi, estimated year 1986
Ever since I was small, I have been haunted by the existential weight of life and self. Who am I? Why am I here? I observed the world through a gaze that felt both painfully sharp and strangely detached.
A five-year-old is not meant to think so deeply. At that age, one should simply exist—going with the flow, playing in the mud, and smelling the rain. But while I felt I belonged to the world, it never truly felt like "home."
I loved my family; more than that, I cared for them with a bone-deep familiarity, as if I had known them across many lifetimes. But outside the sanctuary of my home, the world was a battlefield. I dreaded school. I felt fundamentally different—small and frail, as if I had fought a tumultuous war before I was even born and had already spent all my strength.
Children being children, I was treated differently—or perhaps that was just how I perceived the gap between us. I searched relentlessly for that one friend, a soulmate with whom I could share an instant, profound connection.
First grade gave way to second, and I began to mature, hovering in that strange space between childhood and adulthood. Yet, my soul never stopped searching. I didn't want the casual lunchroom chatter about bullies; I hungered for deep conversations about the meaning of life.
Those were challenging years for the spirit. What I didn’t realize then was that later in life, I would finally begin to find the answers to those haunting questions—and that I might even find the intense soul connections I had been seeking all along. To be continued……..