Homesick Abroad: Why "Just Video Call Home" Doesn't Actually Fix It

I don't know when video calls stopped helping. They used to. In the beginning, seeing Ma's face on the screen was enough to fill whatever gap the day had opened up. She'd hold the phone too close, show me what she cooked, tilt the camera toward the balcony so I could see the plants. And I'd feel something settle inside me, like okay, they're fine, I'm fine, we're all fine. But at some point, and I genuinely cannot pinpoint when, the calls started making it worse. I'd hang up and the silence in my room would feel louder than before. The screen would go dark and I'd just sit there, holding the phone, and the distance between us would feel not like kilometres but like something heavier. Something I couldn't fix by booking a flight.

The version of home that doesn't exist anymore

Here's the thing nobody warned me about. The home I miss is not the home that exists. I'm missing a version of my house, my street, my city that belonged to a specific time. The Pune I left three years ago had my college friends living ten minutes away. It had Sunday lunches that went on for three hours. It had that one chai tapri near FC Road where we'd sit after class and talk about nothing. That Pune is gone. My friends have moved. The tapri shut down during COVID. Ma rearranged the living room. My room has new curtains I didn't pick. I went back last December and spent two weeks feeling like a guest in my own house, and that was maybe the loneliest I've ever been, lonelier than any night alone in my flat in Dublin, because at least in Dublin I expect the loneliness. In Pune it ambushed me. I kept reaching for a version of home that had quietly packed up and left while I wasn't looking. "Tujhe toh adjust karna padega, beta," Papa said when I mentioned it felt different. Adjust. The word every Indian parent reaches for when they don't know what else to say. Adjust karo. As if homesickness is a thermostat you can turn down.

The tiredness nobody sees

I'm tired in a way I can't explain to people here. My flatmates are nice. They invite me to things. I go, sometimes. But there's this constant background hum of effort that comes with being far from the culture you grew up in. Everything requires a small translation. The humour is different. The silences mean different things. When someone here says "we should catch up sometime," they mean it loosely, provisionally, the way you'd bookmark a webpage you never reopen. When my friend back home says "chal milte hain," it means tomorrow, it means definitely, it means I will be annoyed if you cancel. I miss the certainty of that. I miss not having to decode social cues. I miss walking into a room and not being the only person who looks like me. And I'm so tired of missing things that I've started pretending I don't, which is its own kind of exhausting. I tell Ma I'm doing great. I post photos that suggest a life more interesting than it is. I have become very good at performing fine.

What I actually need at 11pm

The worst part of the day is the gap between finishing dinner and falling asleep. That's when it hits. The flat is quiet. My flatmates are in their rooms. The group chat from home has been active all day but the time zone means I missed the good conversations and now it's just goodnight messages. I scroll through old photos sometimes, not because I want to, but because my hands do it automatically, the way you'd reach for a cigarette you quit months ago. I don't need advice. I don't need someone to tell me it gets easier, because honestly, some days it does and some days it doesn't and the unpredictability is part of what makes it hard. What I need, and what I found one night at like 1am when I was sitting on my kitchen floor eating maggi and crying a little, is someone who gets it. Not someone who fixes it. Not a therapist, not a hotline, just a person who hears "video calls make it worse" and doesn't say "but at least you can see them." Haven was that, on that particular night. Just someone listening without trying to solve the unsolvable. And that was enough. Not enough to cure it. Enough to get through the night.