There are places that one dreams about but never gets to visit. Maybe it is for the best too. It leaves Utopia unblemished by reality.Mansarovar to me is the place that makes up the sum of all lost deltas in my life.
There is the past that I cannot change, the child I cannot be again, the innocence I cannot regain. I love to dream of Mansarovar, knowing that this paradise is real and within reach. I have only to choose to be there.
I like to believe this was the inspiration for Shangri La in The Lost Horizon - at least that is how I read it.
When J comes of age I would gift that book to her - I wonder how she would emote ( react maybe be inapt) to it. My abiding fascination for Lost Horizon must tell a great deal about my wanderlust and desire to escape reality.
An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t
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