1.

"I've checked", the Principal said one morning at assembly "The hill behind the school does not seem to have a name. In the memory of those who died in Kashmir, we will call it Tiger Hill. So that we never forget."

It was the monsoon of 1999. I stood there in my first, never-shaved moustache and navy blue uniform, cold despite the blazer and the multitudes who stood silently around me. Princi - as we affectionately called him - spoke on for a while about duty, country, bravery, gratitude and other noble things, and my eyes were moist but I was not really listening. I had long since drifted off into one of my all too frequent day dreams, off in some foreign land unknown to science, exploring, fighting, upholding some nebulous idea of civilisation. Dancing behind my patriotic tears were visions of erudite men in khakis who could shoot straight and fight for the country (which country ?) when they were not writing poetry, observing birds or charming ladies.

Our history textbooks were (of course) filled with accounts of India’s heroic fight for independence and the atrocities of the British. While I was suitably moved by the sacrifices of the freedom fighters and shocked by the brutality and unfairness of the colonial regime, (and I admit this to myself only now) my loyalties lay firmly with the empire builders. In fact, I positively loved the Empire. How do I know this ? Because in my daydreams I was never a revolutionary or even an Indian. I was always a scientist/explorer, implicitly European, privileged, male. I dreamt of being the strapping officer in Africa facing the maneating lions of Tsavo to get a railway built (never mind that Indian slave labourers were used and killed in large numbers ) or one of those promising young archaeologists Doyle liked to write about, bringing treasures from Egypt back “home” to London or even one of Jim Corbett's sportsmen friends trudging through the foothills tracking some maneater or the other, never mind that for all his love of India and Indians, Corbett moved to Kenya the moment India became independent. No doubt he thought the place would go to the dogs directly after the British left.

2.

In the years before Kargil, before our Principal baptised the hill, before my moustache and my long pants, the hill was my first haunt outside the city. One could cycle from my house past the dargah and the unguarded railway crossing and into the wide open countryside. Golden-brown in summer - the dry grass shimmering in the hot wind - emerald green come the monsoon. We would ride out on cycles too big for us, in the rain, past the rushing streams in their little canyons and the tiny crabs clambering over bare rock, riding out to the mist covered hills that dominated the horizon. We rarely got very far though, the mud that clogged up our wheels combined with the hunger that was ever gnawing at our young, rapidly growing bodies always ensured we were home well in time for the next meal.

Occasionally, we would make it all the way to school, and the hill. It is a peculiar type of hill commonly seen on the Deccan, with a one dimensional summit - long, thin and flat. This particular hill also tapered toward the back giving it the appearance of a Sphinx with its head lopped off. And if you stood where the head might have been, you could see the city in the far distance and the hills on the other side of it. Some with a masjid on top, some with temples, sometimes even a tree to liven up the flat, shaven countryside. And directly below you - at your feet - the school, with its fields and buildings arranged in a wide arc. The wind carried soft voices all the way to the top of the hill so that you heard them but could not understand what they were saying. Sheep and cows grazed on the hillside, a bell tinkled occasionally. It was beautiful, and I love it with a love I find impossible to articulate.

3.

In my early years Haggard and Doyle and Stevenson and Defoe invited me to find blanks on the map, rough seas and fierce natives, mysterious artefacts and legends of treasure, forgotten kingdoms and ruined cities. Then in 7th standard, a mathematically minded Vice Principal gifted me Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 : A Space Odyssey. I devoured it, and then devoured every other Clarke book I could find (an obsession that continues to this day) and the nature of my affliction changed forever. Clarke invited me to a world altogether more civilised than the one my daydreams had conjured, but no less marvelous. I now dreamt of exploration and adventure via international scientific bureaucracy - minor astronomers and common engineers on lonely space stations and planetary bases, a gentle, optimistic post-national future threatened only by the vastness and indifference of the universe. What could be more meaningful ? What could possibly compete ? Long before I had heard of Star Trek in my little town on the Deccan, I yearned for Starfleet.

I remember the exact moment - sometime in middle school - when I decided what kind of person I wanted to be. In 2010 : Odyssey Two, the narrator describes Dr. Chandra (the man behind the infamous sentient computer HAL who joined the Russian ship Leonov on its voyage to rescue the American ship Discovery) as having "an educated Indian accent". And as I read those words, I knew, I knew I wanted to be a dislocated scientist, far away, surrounded by foreigners, but (hopefully) with an "educated Indian accent". The idea had an unbearable attraction. Despite the golden grass shimmering in the summer sun and the emerald monsoon hills hiding in the mist, despite family and country and patriotism, I knew I had to leave. The yearning to be part of something greater was too strong, the need to explore, push mankind forward somehow, to belong elsewhere.

What happened then ? The last man landed on the moon over a decade before I was born, and it seems unlikely that humanity will go anywhere in the next 50 years. But, even our complacent age is not without its attractions. The efforts to understand biology and disease using math and physics might lay to rest some more of our oldest enemies, private companies are rushing into space and billions of people from formerly deprived nations now find a voice in the global cacophony. Despite this - and despite having participated in some of it - I remain discomfited. I do not belong, there is no greater Cause, there is no Starfleet.

4.

I remember passing through Kargil a few years after leaving my school and my hometown. Our car stopped, a short walk away from the base of the real, original Tiger Hill. Massive, menacing, unbelievably close to the national highway. I wondered how many Indian army men died there, storming the steep, steep slopes in the darkness in a hail of bullets to drive the insurgents from their entrenched positions. The Light Brigade could hardly have been more valiant. And Tiger Hill was only one of hundreds of such peaks that the Indian army stormed, young officers leading from the front, dying shortly after TV interviews. As one of them famously said, "Yeh dil maange more !".

I felt it keenly then, my Indian-ness. Here, a range of lofty and blood stained mountains that separates my country from another, very different one. There, the Siachen glacier and the Indira Col watershed. A drop of water on this side will flow into the Indus, onto the bustling Indian sub-continent. A drop of water on the other side flows into Central Asia to cities like Kashgar, Khokand, Bokhara, broad, empty plains cut by high mountains, verdant valleys and old old caravan routes and those ancient rivers, the Amu and Syr Darya. A very different country.

To settle down anywhere but India will be to become of that place and my love for my town and my country will not allow that. But my love remains uncomfortable with returning. It is essentially a love of absence and nostalgia, of tragedy and loneliness, of being far away, a love that wants to yearn to be home, but does not want to be at home.

And so I must keep moving, travelling, relocating, relearning. There is nothing else I have ever dreamt of doing, little else I wish to do. Until something fills the hole in my heart that my longing for India occupies, and finally allows me to go home.