I would leave where I’m living now within a heartbeat. That is the honest answer, and it surprised me how quickly it came.
After my recent trip to Leicester, the question stopped being hypothetical. I have visited Leicester many times over the years, but this last trip felt different. There was no wedding pulling me back, no funeral, no obligation. I went because I wanted to, and while I was there I found myself thinking not about the past, but about the future. Could I live here again?
Leicester was my home for seven years after we arrived from Uganda in 1972. My parents lived there. My brother Jitu still lives there. I have family, old friends, and connections that go back more than fifty years. Whenever I go, I feel something I do not feel in Colnbrook. I feel like I am home.
I have lived in Colnbrook for over thirty years. It has been a good place in many ways, and I have written about its history and walked its streets more carefully than most people who live here. But something has shifted in me. After more than fifty years of working, from the age of seventeen to retirement at sixty-five, and after seven years of being alone since Harsha passed, I have reached a point where my own space matters more than anything else.
I sit every day on the seat that used to be Harsha’s. She would sit there and paint. Now I sit there alone. Alone in my heart, alone in my head, alone in a house that sometimes feels too full of other people’s lives and not enough of my own.
I am not looking to run away. I am looking to find something. Somewhere quieter. Somewhere I can spend a whole day without the noise and interruptions that seem to follow me here. Somewhere I can write, walk, think, and simply be. I have spent most of my life doing everything for everyone else. Now, for however many years I have left, I want to do something for me.
I have talked to my daughter about it. The conversation is one we have had more than once, and it never quite resolves. She does not want me to go — I can hear that clearly enough, even when she does not say it directly. Instead, she suggests that perhaps she should be the one to move. But she cannot, not with her situation as it is. And so the conversation circles, lands nowhere, and we both leave it where it sits until next time. I understand her worry. A father leaving is not a small thing, no matter how old the father is or how good his reasons are.
Why Leicester
But the pull is real. Leicester offers things that simply do not exist where I live now. There are walking groups I could join. Temples that serve the community in ways that go beyond worship — places where older people gather, where the language spoken is Gujarati, the language I grew up with, the language I think in. There are parks with activities suited to someone my age, restaurants serving food that tastes like home, and a social life that I do not have here.
Most of all, there is Jitu. I walked him to school in Kampala when he was small. I bought him his first bike. I was the older brother who looked out for the youngest. Now, more than fifty years later, I find myself wanting to be near him again — not because he needs me the way he once did, but because I need the closeness. Moving to Leicester would bring that full circle, back to where it all started for both of us.
Leicester is at the top of my list. I have thought about the countryside too, somewhere truly quiet. I have even thought about going abroad. I do not have a final answer yet. But I know that the question has stopped being “would I leave?” and become “when?”
Something happened recently that confirmed what I already felt. I will not go into the details, but it reminded me that I am in a place where things outside my control keep pulling me into situations I did not choose and do not want. I have spent too many years being dragged into other people’s difficulties. I am trying to break that pattern before it pulls me into another spiral.
This is not a decision I will make overnight. There are practical things to work out, people to consider, and a lifetime of roots in this part of the world that do not pull up easily. But the thought is no longer just a thought. It is becoming a plan.
Could I really leave? Yes. I could leave tomorrow if the pieces fell into place. The harder question is whether the people around me are ready for that. And whether I am brave enough to choose myself, after a lifetime of choosing everyone else.
I think I am getting there.
Leave a Reply