It is the season of autumn, a time when nature sheds its leaves and prepares for a new beginning. It is such a coincidence that this is also the time when we took our oath to become citizen of a country we decided to call our home, about 6 years back.
I still remember the random phone call from an immigration company that I had received while attending a town hall meeting at my previous job in India. I was sure that it was a prank fall. Who decides to leave the very place they have their foundation set in, and uproot to a whole new country, a new world where there is literally no one to call your own? It definitely was a joke, and that was exactly the tone I used when I shared the phone call story with Prashant later that night, when we were talking about our day. But for my husband, Prashant, that struck a chord and remained with him for some days, while he pondered and played with the idea. When he finally brought the topic back up, it was with a determination to give it a shot. What’s the worse that could happen?
2 years from that day, on a very cold Valentine’s Day, we set our first step in this beautiful country we could eventually fall in love with and call our home. The journey from that first step to the moment when the presiding judge declared us Canadians had been a very interesting journey. The ease with which this country engulfed us into its folds and the love we received within these years had been, for the lack of a better word, unexpected. We landed here having no family or friends to call our own. But within these past years, we have made friends who are as close as family, making us feel so welcomed in a new and unknown land.
Today, sitting in the capital of the country, on the eve of Thanksgiving, we are so proud to call ourselves Canadians. We shall never stop being Indians at heart, that’s our motherland after all. But to this country who warmly welcomed us, to our friends (who we proudly call our Canadian family) who made us feel at home, we are so thankful and grateful. As autumn starts, we are also ready to reset and to start a new life as Canadians.