Home Is Where the Heart Is

On March 13, 2020 we got an email from the university informing us that we have to return home the very next day and that a pandemic was brewing. We were told we just have to stay home for two weeks and we’d be back. So, we packed our bags within a few hours, booked the first flight we found and left. My bed not so neatly made and closet haphazardly arranged; we left.

Barely looking around the home we had made out of the vast campus. Fourteen days turned to 30 days turned to 60 days and we stopped keeping count after that. All through our days on campus, we whined about missing home and Ma’s food but somehow; being forced into our homes, no notice and no warning, something doesn’t feel right anymore.

Sneaking into the class because we snoozed the alarm too many times turned to simply logging into our class link. Laughing at breakfast with the whole class and somehow forgetting how bad the mess food was turned to quickly shoving food in our mouths before the online class begins. The food’s great but the heart still feels empty.

We never thought two years on campus would change so much, after all, we always found reasons to complain whilst on it. The world’s in a crisis and we are definitely not the ones facing the worst, yet it somehow feels like something’s been snatched away.


Also read: COVID-19: On Missing the Warmth of Campus Life


Binging on Netflix is great, but walking around the campus at midnight desperately trying to find some chai to soothe the winter blue while the guards yelled, “Beta time hogaya, hostel wapis chalo [It’s time, go back to your hostel]” felt better.

Waking up to the smell of chole bhature on a Sunday is what heaven must be like but something about my friends barging into my room and screaming about the paneer in the mess feels irreplaceable. The bad parts never felt as bad. After all, I had people who could turn up at my door at 3 am with some overcooked microwave Maggi; our laughter louder than the pain. But now, crying feels lonelier and the troubles feel heavier.

It feels ungrateful to moan and whine when we look at the graduating batches being snatched away of so much. Of their last days with friends turned families, in buildings turned homes. Almost like a book with its final chapter torn away. It doesn’t hit me quite yet that I have friends who are graduating too. Maybe it will hit me once I go back and I will longer have them to give me their old notes or to calm me down before my exams telling me that if they survived that subject, I definitely could.

Everything around us feels like some sort of symbolism of how quick things can change. Yesterday we were making dinner and movie plans together and now we Netflix Party and text about how lame that jump scare was. I know we will be fine. We always are but I cannot wait to walk around way past the curfew again, the guards hot on our tail reminding us that “ab time ho gaya, wapis chalo.

Chandra Lekha is a second-year law student from OP Jindal Global University, Sonepat.

Featured image credit: Rosalind Chang/Unsplash