Homecomings are always special. It feels like spring when the flowers bloom again and the rain finally respires us from the usual mundaneness. Although everything sounds merry about coming back, the only thing that may not sit straight is how certain things subtly change in your home while you are away.
There is one scene from Kapoor and Sons that really stuck with me. It is when Arjun Kapoor (Sidharth Malhotra) comes back from Newark. He notices that all his belongings were lying in his room and the cupboards he used to store his books and other things are now filled with his mom’s skin care products. Now, when I move back to the comforts of my home, I can perfectly relate to Arjun’s predicament. Things that I could locate even without looking at them are now kept at places I don’t know. The books that used to be arranged in a particular order are now all haphazard because who has the time to reorder them?
You may notice minimal differences in the arrangement of your furniture, chairs, sofas and other things. For instance, the charger that was previously lying in the hanger may now be stuffed inside a closet, the food container that was laid on the dining table would now lay somewhere unused, the newspaper rack has now become the shoe rack, and even the faces of your housekeepers have changed, and you have little clue who’s who. The personal space where you had all your prized possessions displayed and protected has now easily become a public place that also substitutes a medicine cabinet. You would want to nag, want to crib about all the shifts that took place, but then, how can you? You are already going back, leaving all those developments behind, and at the end of the day, it won’t even matter.
Homecomings are also a time when you finally get all the love and pampering that you were deprived of due to living alone. And hence, the voices that used to ridicule you for being lazy in bed are now telling you to take some rest. You go grocery shopping and your mom advises you not to buy anything which you will not eat immediately because once you are gone, there will be no one to finish the food. You observe your family discussing things with you (and even taking suggestions from you) which they earlier referred to as ‘problems to be dealt with by elders’ Your parents, who used to sleep until late, are now early risers with a proper routine to take care of themselves.
There is nothing you can do about it but sit and realize that time changes everything. Be it your father slowly walking beside you instead of challenging you to a race or be it your mother struggling to come down the stairs that she previously used to go up multiple times in a day. The energy and zeal that your parents had before are not there anymore. While the changes can be gradual or fast, what you can do is happily embrace them, try to live in the present, and be ready for future transitions.