Memoirs      
Home is Where the Heart is
by Neha Girotra

One man all by himself is nothing. Two people who belong together make a world. With that adage in mind I embarked on a roller coaster of changes last year, and moved from Mumbai, India to Wellington, New Zealand. The move has changed my life dramatically, but I can’t say I’ll ever regret the decision.

India is many things to many people, to me its home and it always will be. But as they say, the home is where the heart is and my heart belonged, to an engineer who was offered a contract with a leading telecom provider in New Zealand for a couple of months. I bid my then boyfriend, a teary eyed farewell with a heavy heart and, hoping against hope that this temporary move wouldn’t kill our relationship. Six months later, he was still in New Zealand, with no hope of returning in the near future. So we pined for each other and we fought and we ranted and raved across countries and borders, to find a solution to our long distance affair.

The New Zealand Harbor

The move meant good things for him professionally, but the barriers of distance were killing us. I couldn’t get up and leave to join him in New Zealand, as much as I wanted to, because you don’t just do that in India. We live in a rigid society where a couple that aren’t married just do not live together. Living without each other was such sheer torture that we decided to do the inevitable, we got married. We had a grand, traditional-three day Indian wedding, with all the frills that went with it. Relatives from all over the globe flew in, friends who’d predicted that ‘me’ a headstrong career minded woman, who’d be the last amongst us to be married, were flabbergasted and everyone who knew my fiancé a die- hard bachelor, were amazed. We still took the plunge. I quit my job at a high profile fashion magazine and packed my bags and went from being ‘Ms’ to ‘Mrs’ in a matter of months.

My brand new husband had to fly back to New Zealand immediately, and I couldn’t fly with him because of some visa issues, and so I bid him yet another teary-eyed farewell. A week later the ‘visa’ saga concluded and I had to plank the long and daunting flight from Mumbai to Wellington. I had never in my 23 years stepped foot outside of India, and so the prospect of 24-hour journey into an alien country seemed terrifying. I put on a brave face none the less and laden with a knapsack bigger than me, boarded my flight, which would take from Mumbai to Singapore on the first leg, where after an 18-hour halt I would fly to Auckland and then Wellington.

At first the thought of spending all that time at the Changi airport in Singapore seemed very exiting. I mean Changi is every shopaholic’s dream come true, and I don’t know of a single other person who loves to shop more than I do. But after wandering around the duty-free haven of Singapore for a couple of hours, the excitement soon turned into boredom. To kill time I booked myself into two of the six free city tours that the airport was organizing and merrily embarked on a fascinating trip into the heart of Singapore. The tour was excellent, we were taken to the most frequently visited spots of the city, and the best part was that it didn't cost a thing. We spent the better part of the day, basking in the warmth of the enchanting city. I left Singapore with the memory of a very pleasant experience, and was away to continue my journey to my new home.

– Continued

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