When the air tastes like radiance and the days drip with donut-pink glaze, it’s easy to fall in love with the whimsy and effervescence of life. It is also tempting to believe you aren’t perhaps fully cooked—maybe only a tad bit caramelised. 

These days are far and few between, and Providence spring somewhat subverts the definitions that make the season so scrumptious and splendid. Temperatures peak above freezing point as if hesitant to embrace warmth and brilliance, and the sky shudders until it is enveloped by a blanket of grey. Every so often, the clouds burst into tears and we stare at the mirages of the universe’s transient glory. Occasionally, though, sunshine will seep into life and love, and it feels like a monumental tectonic shift. People congregate on the Main Green, and we look like the multicultural, vivacious, eternally joyous college students that stock photos love.

When I think of spring, I don’t think of cold winds and desolate skies or sunshine so rare it fosters communal celebration. Instead, my mind conjures images of the sun glinting against rose-tinted bangles, spices clinging to sweet, restless air, and yellow champa flowers decorating the trees outside my house. 

I may be biased—after all, I am the legacy of marble world-wonders and ankle-bells and Hindu aartis permeating through white walls. I am from a country where spring is the season of intertwining shadows entering dazzling minuets on wooden floors and myna birds flitting between the Mughal architecture dotting the pretty parks. In Delhi, spring is vibrant Holi colours, pleasant breezes kissing tremulous trees, and decadent mithai with aromas that hasten to diffuse love, warmth, and home.

Delhi spring is oh-so-unserious because exams just ended and it feels like you’re free forever—but it’s also transient in the oxymoronic way that tiny breaks and sweet treats can relieve you of real and monumental weight.

Here, though, my midterms proceed, and the Hindi songs in my playlists make me feel nostalgic for the blossoms that smell like mangos and sunrise and new, imperfect, idyllic dreams. I miss the vivid yellows, sitar symphonies, and how the light falls on my nani’s plants in the balconies. But I know that when I go back, I’ll yearn for the sharp, zingy air and the shy, shivering half-light, and the flowers that bud slowly but surely, infusing my day with more sunshine than the cosmos could ever hope to. The melt of ice into peace-puddles and the way frost-bitten branches transform into gentle caresses that embrace me far from home will make this home, as much as it feels like a betrayal to admit it. 

The thing about having multiple homes is that the boundaries start to blur, and you float in an illusory space where you are both present and distant, reminiscent and yet unabashedly alive. You yearn for something that can tether you to the familiar and unfamiliar, old and new, and perhaps you’ll learn to cherish both homes in their unique identity. Perchance, though, like me, you’ll merge the two into an amalgamation that is different and distorted and beautiful and somewhat resembles how it feels to be suspended and glittering in various degrees of known. 

So when white flowers adorn the dainty tree outside Salomon and the windy paths down to RISD become abuzz with the honeycombs of my dreams, I’ll think of bright chilly air, champa flowers outside my window, and dust-choked, winding roads, here and there, that lead to home, wherever I make it.