Eight Octobers in Munich. Not one of them sounded like home

Eight years in Munich. Long enough for a favourite bakery. Not long enough to stop feeling like an impostor every October, when Durga Pujo happens without me. I'm an engineer — supposed to be logical about homesickness. I'm not.

Back home, the days before Ashtami changed the air itself. New clothes laid out the night before. The first dhak before you'd even had your tea. A whole city rearranging itself around a handful of pandals. In Munich, October just means the leaves turn. I'd call home at odd hours — for the noise in the background, more than anything anyone actually said.

A video call only goes so far. You can see the pandal — you can't feel it get louder as you push toward it. So I started sketching the feeling instead. Badly, at first, in the margins of notebooks. A dhaki mid-stride. A coffee cup going cold on a College Street table. Not for anyone else. For me to wear.

The engineer in me couldn't leave it at a sketch. Redrawing the same dhaki until his stride was right. Nudging one line of Bengali until it sat correctly on the dial. Joer is a debugger's stubbornness, pointed at a wristwatch instead. Not because the watch needed it. Because I did.

Not watches about India, for people discovering it. About the small, unglamorous things a person from Kolkata misses at six on a Tuesday in Munich — a coffee house adda, a monsoon window, a drumbeat before dawn. If you've never left home, some of these won't land, and that's fine. They're for the eight Pujos I've missed. And for the part of me that still sets an alarm for Mahalaya, even with nothing to wake up for here.