The night before I left for the UK, is vividly etched in my memories – my living room felt smaller than it ever had before. My suitcases sat open on the floor, half-packed, as though they too were unsure where they belonged. I had filled and emptied those same suitcases countless times over the years, but this time was different. I was simply not leaving a place. I was dismantling a life I had carefully and slowly built for myself, and the most comforting and confronting part was the fact that my whole family – father, mother, and brother, sat with me to help me with the packing, similar to how they have acted as the backbone of most of my decisions to date.
When I first moved from Bangladesh to the UK, it felt nothing short of a miracle. I had survived the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. I was lucky enough to make the move to the UK at a time when cases were at their peak, with no vaccine having existed yet. God favoured me every step of the way, as all my health check-ups, including my much-awaited COVID test, came back negative prior to my departure.
It was after entering my dorm on the first day that I felt the pang of all the emotions that had been sitting numb in my mind all these months.
The quietness and solitude around felt eerie; I could hear my breath so loudly. The absence of the honking sounds surrounding me all my life was profoundly amiss. With time, I learned to live with the absence of my family and friends around. Amid all the silence, I built healthy routines. God sent me friends who became family. After my quarantine was over, I gradually learned which streets felt safe, which cafés felt familiar, and which people I could turn to in difficult days. The unfamiliar became some of my most familiar spaces. I formed attachments to people, places, and a version of myself that felt more independent. Along the way, I had the support of my friends and family back home to whom I could send countless photos and videos, while discussing how we can visit some of those particular places together and build new rituals.
People assume that being at home means being settled. What they do not see is the loss of a version of you that you do not have much hold of anymore. The sense of belonging and a renewed identity that took eons to build had to be surrendered too quickly.
I had finally found a balance of my mixed emotions. The emotions that once burst out to permanently return home as soon as possible, gradually made space for excitement to return to this new home in Manchester from my vacations in Dhaka.
That attachment is what made leaving again so painful.
Returning to Bangladesh was surprisingly quiet, heavy, and emotionally confusing. I was surrounded by familiarity, yet I felt strangely out of place. Life felt different because both my country and I had changed. The first thing I experienced after returning to my home country was the July Uprising. I was overwhelmed and somewhat found a renewed sense of patriotism amid the looming confusion. However, as time passed, the sense of detachment only continued to increase amid the rising atrocities around. This is not the people and the country I left.
There is a particular loneliness that comes with returning that I am still unable to comprehend. People assume that being at home means being settled. What they do not see is the loss of a version of you that you do not have much hold of anymore. The sense of belonging and a renewed identity that took eons to build had to be surrendered too quickly.
Alongside the sadness came guilt. Guilt for missing a place where I did not want to stay for a long time since moving. Guilt for longing for a life I could not continue, for some hard decisions I had to make. Guilt for not feeling grateful enough, despite being close to family and friends again.
Returning forced me to confront an uncomfortable truth: belonging is not always singular. Sometimes it is divided – stretched across borders, time zones, and different versions of yourself.
Maisha in Manchester
There is seldom any room in popular narratives for this in-between experience. Success is often deemed as linear progress: you leave, you grow, and you pass all the ladders of triumph that society deems fit. But many of us exist in the unresolved middle. We are shaped by places we can no longer inhabit physically, so we are left to live in them with our bag full of memories and gratitude. We learn to grow again in our old soil, with our own definitions of bloom.
Some days, I ache for the life I left behind, which enabled me to see different countries around the world on my own – another feather on my hat, as I never thought that I could travel alone across borders. That is a story for another time.
Other days, I am deeply aware of the privilege of being close to my family and friends, of hearing familiar sounds, of belonging without having to explain myself. I get to experience the little joys which I missed during my time abroad, such as, wearing my beautiful traditional outfits and celebrating each occasion – Eid or Pohela Boishakh with friends and family, enjoying rickshaw rides that I missed direly, hearing the Azaan (Muslim call to prayer), sipping my favourite coffee in a familiar café, basking in the sunlight which was amiss from my life for a couple of years, and the list can go on.
I eventually unpacked my suitcases. Now they rest in the corner of my room – empty, but not forgotten, while I wear my favourite clothes I purchased there, which still carry the fresh smell of the detergent I washed them with, prior to my return. I did not have the courage to sift through them for a whole year. After a year of retrospection, I am finally taking them out, one at a time, wearing them, and clinging to the false hope that the smell of that familiar detergent will not leave, similar to how my life away in a new home has left me.
Maisha Zaman is a research and communication professional. She can be reached at [email protected]
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