Personal

My wife Shirin’s first pregnancy was difficult. We were in Mountain View, California, and it was during the COVID lockdowns with all the isolation rules that came with it. After her Caesarean section, she had to stay in the hospital for a week because of high blood pressure, likely caused by damage to her kidney by a reaction to high dosage ibuprofen for pain management. The baby was doing great and the hospital had discharged him. I was lucky to have my mother in the US at that time and I could take him home to her and be back at the hospital, but letting the baby leave was devastating for Shirin. Dealing with the broken American health apparatus is stressful at the best of the times, but those few weeks aged us by years. We moved back to India soon after this, I am sure our timelines to move accelerated after this traumatic experience.

Murakami in his fantastic book about running “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running” says that a gentleman ought never talk about what he does to stay physically fit. I kind of agree, but if I am being honest I love reading about what other people do to stay fit. I assume most of these people are gentlemen. I am always slightly worried about not being a gentleman so I will write at the outset that this writeup is not meant to extol the virtues of yoga and how you should definitely be practising it to be a better person, but more a letter of gratitude to yoga.

There has to be a German/Japanese/Sanskrit word for that feeling you get when a particularly beautiful period of your life is over and you understand that you will never get it back. You have some excitement and a little apprehension about the future but the overwhelming sense is that of a loss of something precious. “Nostalgia” seems to be reserved for a yearning for a more distant past. Wistfulness comes close but is probably not it. What I am trying to describe is the way I felt when school/college/PhD/postdocs ended and it was time to leave the city and move on. Never in my life did I think that I would ever feel sad leaving the Mumbai and Baltimore city limits permanently. Things could only be better elsewhere! But I suppose in that moment those places carried the memory of my experiences and all the people I had met. I still cannot explain it. The last time I had felt this strange sadness was when I left Boston after working there as a postdoc for a couple of years in a fantastic lab with great colleagues. But I genuinely liked my time there so feeling sad for leaving Boston at least made sense.