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My grandmother, along with her family, left our ancestral home of Kashmir on a snowy winter night. The next day the wooden houses were burnt down by the militants, and along with that, any chance of us ever coming back again. But we did come back, two decades later. A ten-year-old me and a sixty-year-old grandmother. She was in her element, but I had grown up in the city. I didn’t speak the language . Wherever we went, we were the objects of curiosity as we were those who had “run-away”. The people felt foreign to me even though the place didn’t. "From this tree, to that one over there, it's all ours", she said proudly pointing towards the orchard of apple trees. This was enough for me to start gliding through, in fact, it was mine, the soil beneath my feet was mine! This was my first visit, but I felt at home. I had never experienced loss of home like my grandmother did, but it was something that was passed on to me. Stories of a lost paradise were the only ones she had ever told me. Years of living in exile had created an inter generational longing to belong, somewhere. With the air, the grass and the trees, I felt at peace. Even more so, looking at my grandmother’s rare display of elation, made the day even brighter. Suddenly something stung. A small black thorn had neatly pierced my palm out of nowhere. I was out of my trance. I begin to climb down. Me and my grandmother pierced and grazed but the thorn couldn't be pulled. But then I saw her. I'd seen her before somewhere, in a dream perhaps. Or maybe not, but she felt like home. She was moving like a gentle breeze of air. Her brownish color mixed with the reddish complexion of her cheeks. Her short hair bounced on her shoulders as she skipped along the trail. Something pulled me towards her, but my legs remained frozen. So much so that I couldn't feel that my palm had gone red by my grandmother's incessant attempts. In an irritable despair, suddenly my grandmother looked up, and seeing her called out ,"Hey! Come, come here!". She stopped and stared for a second. My heart dropped like an anvil. But her eyes didn’t mull us over. She saw us as if it was perfectly natural for us to be there and in an instant, she started jumping towards us up to where we were standing. There was no pain. Everything was perfect. All this time, she was looking at my grandmother, not at me. It broke my heart, but I knew I wasn't strong enough to look into her eyes. My grandmother just pointed towards the thorn and she took my hand into hers as naturally as if it was her own. She plucked out the small black thorn in one smooth motion. She glanced at my grandmother again who caressed her gently. She started to walk away as aloof as she had come. As she moved away, I plucked a wildflower that I knew I'd never give her. Or maybe I would, someday, if we ever meet again.