As it turns out, a whole year is a tad too long to be away from home for. I landed in Delhi last night (“Twenty two degrees on a winter night?!” and “Immigration officials in India are mean to foreigners”), made my way out of the airport without any incident (quite unlike last year, when I was asked for a bribe by the customs official at the Green Channel while he dipped his moustache in tea), found my sister and dad at the gate and talked non-stop to them on the way home (between mouthfulls of Dairy Milk, that is), hugged my mom at the door (who thankfully forgot to ask who brought the luggage up the four flights of stairs), and proceeded to peer around the drawing room to see if anything had changed (“Where’s the TV gone?!”).

I then spent a good bit of time pottering around the house examining everything from coffee tables to Christmas cards, opening all the cupboards in my room (“Where did those books come from?”), lamenting the lack of speakers (I’ve grown quite used to listening to loud music every day, which is a marked difference from my first year in college when I listened to practically no music for a whole semester), hunting for a Singapore-to-India plug adapter, weighing arbitrary household items with my sister’s travel luggage weighing scale (if only I had that before leaving I wouldn’t have had to hand my things over to a certain someone at the airport) till I could bear it no longer and picked up both my guitars making a prolonged arrival announcement to my neighbours by ‘testing’ my guitar amp (there’s nothing quite like the sound of a real amp), never mind the late hour. My overexcitedness refused to let me spend enough time tuning my guitar though, instead peppering me with dilemmas of the “What should I do now?” sort: Unpack? Read a book? Call someone? Watch television? Plan what to do over the next two weeks? Eat? Sing at the top of my voice?

I ended up compensating for my indecision by reading the preface of Summer Lightning (yes, I literally read books from cover to cover — no, that’s not the reason it took me a year to finish The Book Thief) and turning in for the night, to be awoken to Flipkart’s delivering Artemis Fowl and the Last Guardian at noon.

It’s great to be back home.

PS: If you’re trying to watch Youtube videos on a 512 kbps connection shared between three people, you’re gonna have a bad time.