Not that you'd know it from the blog, but I have in fact been back in Melbourne for four days now. In the time I was away, the Gippsland fires were extinguished and the Qantas buyout approved, but David Hicks is still rotting in Guantanamo. Melbourne's been through the heat of high summer and settled back into school - universities started their academic year on Monday. Big blocks of dorms catering to foreign students which were still construction sites a month ago are now finished and inhabited. Bananas are affordable again, but lettuce seems more expensive. The food court at Southern Cross Station has opened, including a big open bar called, appropriately enough, Loco. Australian cricket has turned bottom up, losing five matches in a row to every comer, right after having won five of five glorious matches against England in "The Ashes" in December. And my nephews are heavier.
But India hasn't let me go. Each of the last three nights (my first night back I slept like a log for eleven hours) I've been waking every half hour into the wee hours, convinced that I am staying in some not-quite-secure place in India. In the half light my half-unpacked bags on Lygon Street, or the brick wall and dried plants outside my sister's guest room window (I came out to Shepparton yesterday) take on the shape of inscrutable nocturnal landscapes of indeterminate depth, from which someone might come in through the open door or window... Not that I had any experiences like that in India itself! "Sounds like post-traumatic stress," says my sister. It rather does, doesn't it!
