Sound. I suddenly miss sound more than anything else. It’s early November, and I have just—the luggage tags are yet to come off the suitcases—returned from New Delhi to Ontario. Here, eleven thousand kilometres away from my mother’s house, fall has run its course, and as it steps forward, winter, true to its habit of stripping its surroundings, has taken away the auditory background track of the warmer months—children’s holler, music coming off backyard parties, the lawn mower’s monotonous drone. This is the first time in my seven years of living in Canada, though, that I am finding the early-winter quietude utterly disquieting, almost impossible to deal with. Sitting on my bed as I work on my laptop, my ears long to hear the blare of traffic running through the main road facing my Delhi home. It’s a weird wish, considering how grating that non-stop vehicular noise feels like when I am at my mother’s. Absurdity is a key ingredient of nostalgia, I infer. What else could explain this yearning for hearing Delhi’s hyper masculine traffic noise or the fact that I wear wrist watches still set to India time at work?