Worth the wait

Today, the weariness of waiting weighs heavy. As the seemingly endless rain beats away at the tired city below, and the cold seeps into my bones, I can’t seem to summon the strength to reach over and turn on the heat. The voice in my head reminds me that we are all like the ocean, we ebb and we flow, and I know that you’ve caught me at my ebb this evening. The flow will come, says the voice … but it’s taking longer and longer each day, and I am unsure if today is the day it doesn’t return. 

Living my life while a part of me waits, on tenterhooks, this is something I have learnt to do well. For many different reasons. Every 12 weeks or so, for example, as the sound of your receding footsteps fade into the silence, well, at-least what passes for silence in midtown Manhattan, it reminds me that it has started. The waiting. 

There are so many different kinds of waiting. This one, when I wait for you to return to us, telling myself that six weeks will pass by in the blink of an eye. The first week, when the empty spaces in the house echo with the absence of your quiet laughter and the sound of Duolingo pings, when all of us would look knowingly at each other and say, here Baba goes again. The second one when we are drawn into the humdrum of our schedules, the meetings, homework, tests and dinners, telling ourselves we are too busy to miss you. The third and forth where the daily business of living, with it’s triumphs and stumbles, draws us in, the final two weeks where our patience is wearing thin and we check the date a few times every day until the day you return is finally here, trying to pretend that what we are all really doing, is waiting. The dog too ! 

But isn’t that what we spend most of our lives doing? One of my most recurring memories was Bijoya Dashami, or Dussehra,   The end of Pujo, when Ma Durga goes back to Shiva, promising to return, on the same day, next year. Wait for me, she says, I will be back, and bring back with me the three happiest days of the year of a Bengali childhood. Songs are written about that moment “come back next year, Ma, I will be waiting.” Waiting. In all the dances we faithfully performed based on Tagore’s glorious compositions, almost all the ones I remember most clearly, are based on waiting – Radha for Krishna to return, bringing back the music and the colour, Mira  for her beloved to appear in her prayers. My own dance practice, the secret love of my life, Odissi, of heart stopping grace, rhythm and poetry, is full of movements on the thought of separation (Biraho) and waiting for separation to end. 

But isn’t a lot of life, even the humdrum part of it, really about the waiting? Waiting to get to your destination, assuming that joy awaits you when you get there. Waiting for the seventeen hour flight to land so that you can get home and curl into bed, thoroughly exhausted but thoroughly happy. Waiting for your 16 year old as she dries her hair for 45 minutes, until she emerges, looking exactly as she did before, beautiful always; for the four month old puppy as he scouts the neighbourhood for the ideal spot to do his business, as you idly wonder about his criteria and indeed, his choices, trying not to meet the indulgent and pitying eyes of the passersby. 

Then there is the other kind of waiting. The one where you wait a year to be told that you’ve been picked, that there is a baby for you, who needs a home. Waiting for months to bring them home, holding them tight against you on the flight back home, their light curls twisting around your fingers as the fiercest of love burns into tears behind your eyes. Waiting for the final paperwork, as their fingers learn to grip yours so hard it hurts, not letting your mind stray to the unimaginable. Or waiting for them to come back from their first long school trip away from home, fourteen years later, the same feelings flooding your eyes as the bus pulls up. 

Then there is a lighter kind of waiting …  My new home has brought seasons back into my life, with all the lows that teach you to truly treasure the highs. Waiting for the splendour that is  fall … for winter to turn into spring and miraculously turn a city of rushing, at best purposeful – at worst angry, inhabitants into a completely unrecognisable bevy of spontaneous, smiling, sun lovers. It is certainly worth the wait, that one. 

Sometimes though, you just wait for that feeling of loss to end. You know it eventually will. Not that the feeling grows lighter, you just learn to cope better. And because you know that that day will come, where you will smile without trying, the pain just another comfortable old friend that keeps you company, you get through the waiting. I’ve moved homes and countries a few times, and that was a kind of waiting too. Waiting for the joy to creep in, the sheer delight of the new to take hold, the memory of the old to loosen its grip, patiently, because you just know it will, with time. And it does. 

Sometimes you are waiting for an answer, your feet trembling on the edge of a fork, where one of the bends may change the course of your life and set you on a road you have not travelled before. The fear lurks just below the surface, sometimes surfacing in waves at 2 am, as secret fears tend to do, as you struggle with your powerlessness over your choices. Sometimes, the answer comes first, sometimes your acceptance of what just is. But until then, you wait. 

But not today. Today, I am just waiting for myself … the most important part of me that comes back with the flow, after the ebb, the strongest and most resilient corner of me that takes the heartbreak of days like this and washes it away with acceptance and peace, the deepest and wisest part of me that realises that to love is to hurt, and I must never stop the love as that would stop the living, and I can absorb it in my limitless still waters of quiet joy. I do know it’s there. Today, it is elusive though, and the wait, is exhausting and almost unbearable. 

I’m waiting for hope to return. It will be worth the wait.