Happy to be here

Meera clutched her mother's worn photograph, finally stepping onto Chennai soil after fifteen years. The WhatsApp group—her diaspora lifeline—had pooled resources for her ticket home. They celebrated digitally as she landed, their reactions flooding her screen: beaming emojis, messages of longing, declarations of love. Standing before her ancestral home, Kannadasan's poetry echoed in her heart. Those verses about belonging that her grandmother once recited now made profound sense. The cash her community had gathered represented something beyond money—it was connection, faith, and roots rewoven. She wasn't just visiting; she was coming home to herself, to them, to everything that had shaped her soul.