It was late night, but not the empty kind. There were still people on the streets—other auto-rickshaws weaving through the dark, figures on motorcycles, someone walking quickly with a bag. But I had the sense that we were all moving in the same direction, even if our routes diverged. Homeward. That invisible gravity pulling everyone back.
I was in the back with my wife and son. My one-year-old was half-asleep in my arms, his weight settling into that particular heaviness that only comes when a child surrenders completely to rest. His eyes would flicker open occasionally, unfocused, then close again. I wondered what was going on in his mind—if anything we’d call “thought” in the way I think of it.
And then it occurred to me: he was already home. Not in the sense of destination, but in the sense of being. He didn’t carry the strict definitions I’ve built up over the years—home as a place with walls and a door, safe as a condition requiring certain coordinates. For him, safe was home. My arms, the rumble of the rickshaw, the dark—it was all the same country. He was drifting, untethered to categories.
That was a heavy responsibility, to be someone’s entire geography. But I liked it. It grounded me.
Still, I wanted to drift like him. I wanted to remember what it felt like to be home without needing to arrive anywhere. And as I thought that, something unexpected surfaced—memory fragments, sudden and vivid. Similar episodes: me as a small child, drowsing in my own father’s arms in the back of some vehicle, the night passing outside, the hum of motion, the sense of being carried.
But then—and this is where it gets strange—I caught myself. I was calling it memory. As if it were something archived, something over there in the past, separate from this moment. But the process I call memory is happening now: the neurons firing, the images assembling, the feeling of recognition—it’s all present-tense. I was making the experience secondhand by labeling it memory, as if the past were a different room I was peering into, rather than a texture of this very moment.
In that moment, I was neither the father holding my son nor the child drifting in my father’s arms. I was observing both experiences. I had labeled one as memory, though they were both happening in the present. It was the same play, the same scene, running concurrently. I was just watching it from two different seats.
I envied that drift. My version of home was a mortgage and a location pin; his was just skin and temperature. I was observing the coastline from a plane—I knew intellectually it was beautiful, but I couldn’t feel the salt.
The auto-rickshaw continued through the streets. My son stirred slightly, then settled again. I looked down at his face, then out at the passing lights, then back again. There was road ahead. The map on my phone showed a few more minutes to arrival. But the strange thing was, even if just for a moment—I no longer felt like I was waiting to arrive.
The sense of home had already settled in, quiet and unobtrusive. It wasn’t attached to the gate we’d eventually reach or the rooms behind it. It was here, in this rattling motion, in the small sleeping weight against my chest, in the strange doubling of experience that made past and present the same theater.
The labeling continued—father, son, memory, home—but for a flicker, the labels felt transparent. Not gone, but porous. And in that porosity was the grace: not in recovering what was lost, but in recognizing that the same play was still running, and I was still in it. I let the night carry the rickshaw, the rickshaw carry me, and me carry him. A nesting doll of tired bodies, hurtling toward a destination that didn’t really matter anymore.
The rickshaw moved on.
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