Dear Britain,
It is late January 2017, and I am in the back of a cab on a motorway I do not yet know the name of. Outside, the sporadically placed lamps cast a bleak yellow light upon dark grey tarmac, glistening under a fine layer of moisture. The cars move steadily around us. Everything is quiet in the way that only winter nights in unfamiliar places can be — not peaceful exactly, but hushed, as if the world is holding its breath.
I am holding mine too.
I lean into the husband and rest my head on his shoulder. His warmth is the only thing that feels known to me right now. Behind us, somewhere over several time zones and thousands of miles of sky, is everything I have ever called home. Thirty-three years of a life. A career threaded together contact by contact over a decade. A flat in Bengaluru that overlooked a forest of untamed trees, where the impatient wind was our first visitor every morning. My parents. My brother. Friends who have known me since before I knew myself. The accumulated, invisible weight of belonging somewhere.
I have left all of it. We have left all of it.
Two bags. Two passports. One very large leap of faith.
“What are you thinking?” asks the husband softly, breaking into my reverie.
I pause. Outside, Britain continues to unspool in the dark — hedgerows, overpasses, the steady red procession of taillights ahead. I feel the question settle into me, looking for an honest answer.
“I am thinking,” I say finally, “if this land will be our new home.”
He is quiet for a moment. Then he smiles — I can feel it more than see it, there in the dark of the cab — and says, “Only if you want it to be.”
Only if you want it to be.
I turn the words over slowly, like something fragile. Such a simple thing to say. Such an enormous thing to mean. Because wanting it — truly wanting it — would require me to open my hands and release everything I had spent a lifetime holding. It would mean beginning again, at thirty-three, in a country where I knew almost no one, where my decade of professional experience counted for little, where even the rain fell differently.
And yet.
We had landed at Heathrow a little earlier, the icy air funnelling through the entries and exits of the parking lot to extend its rushed, indifferent embrace to each tired traveller. I had stood there for a moment with my bags at my feet, bracing for something — a recoil in response to the cold perhaps, or panic — and felt instead a stillness I hadn’t expected. As if some quieter, braver part of me had already decided, and was simply waiting for the rest of me to catch up.
The cab turns off the motorway. We are heading to Chigwell, a town in east London, where the husband’s aunt and uncle have opened their home to us for these first uncertain weeks. I look out at the dark streets, the lit windows of houses we pass, the ordinary, unhurried life of a country that does not yet know I have arrived.
I press closer to him. He wraps his arm around me without a word — the way he always does, the way that has always been enough.
Through the windows I see you, dear Britain, moving past in the dark. Quiet. Waiting. Unknowingly perhaps already beginning to be mine.
With love, Purna