I sing because I’m free.

We are back from two weeks with Rob’s parents in South Carolina. It was relaxed and slow and peaceful. Everything that we needed. I especially enjoyed meeting the whole family and some of Rob’s friends from where he went to college who were very influential in his life. Even though I hadn’t met most of these people before, it strangely felt like I’d known them all along, which is a great feeling!

Now here we are back in Mumbai which is about as opposite of Summerville as the north pole is of the south. Rob of course has swung back into work and routine like nobody’s business. Me… well, not so easy with me. The transition hasn’t been the smoothest to be honest. First of all, we came home with one bag left behind in Munich thanks to a storm in New York which lead to re-routing all of our flights and then further confusion ensued… We finally arrived home to some major water shortage so we went to bed sticky and mucky from 20+ hours of travel and then woke up to no water again after a jet-lagged and exhausted sleep of 12 hours. The water keeps copping out before I can finish a full load of laundry and I know it’s not the end of the world but it’s frustrating. Maybe it would be easy to leave it all behind if I got up and went to work and left all these household woes behind me but my work is here. Right here on this desk in my “office” which is also my living-room cum dining-room cum laundry-drying-room cum guest-room.

I’m trying to just roll with the punches but you know what, sometimes I just don’t want to roll with the punches. I want living in this city that I have a love-hate relationship with to not always feel like swimming against the freakin’ tide.

So here I am struggling to switch gears to back to “life-as-usual-as-a-reluctant-Mumbaiker” and I am reminded by a dear friend who recently became a mother in a painful and long labour of this song called Sparrow by Audrey Assad and I hold on to these words:

I sing because I’m happy
I sing because I’m free
His eye is on the sparrow
His eye is on the sparrow
And I know, He is watching me.