People keep asking me the same question.

When are you leaving?

ISDM, the school in Delhi where I spent the last year studying development, closed on June 24. The batch scattered. The hostel is emptying. My friend Pao and I still live in room 404, the room that turned into a family this year. And when people ask us when we are leaving, we give the same answer every time.

We don't know.

They laugh. They think we are avoiding the question. We are not. But I could not explain it either. Not until this week.

Let me be honest about something first. For a day or two after the program closed, I felt something I have not said out loud. People were leaving while I was leaving. Same campus, same room, but the place was emptying around me. It felt flat. Nobody tells you about the flat days.

Then Saturday evening, 13 percent battery, a trainer from my old network put up a status. A page from a book, with flower photos next to it.

Give yourself space to finally think.

With the flowers, it felt like Muruga sent it. Muruga is the god I trust. He has a habit of reaching me through other people's phones.

The page said the way out is a hard reset. Drop everything. I have done hard resets before. The last one was in May, at Tushita, a meditation centre in the Dharamshala mountains, with a broken phone and cash in my pocket. That one reset my mind.

But this advice did not fit now. Drop everything? My next chapter is already full. New work starting. A conference paper in Finland that just got its date. There was nothing to drop.

Or so I thought.

I have one rule I have followed for years. When my heart says something, I say it and I mean it. It has cost me at times. It gives pain in the moment. But every single time, later, I see it did the good thing. And this week my heart was not saying drop the path. It was saying: some things are still open. Close them.

So I started closing. One at a time.

I wrote thank-you notes. Not to the famous names. To the people who held the year up and whose names are on no certificate. Mona, who let me walk into her classroom just to say hi. Afsar bhai, who taught me Hindi one gentle correction at a time. Aamir, who marked my attendance term after term with one word. Satjyot, my counsellor, who gave me a grounding line I still use every morning.

Each note closed one door. And each time a door closed, my body relaxed a little. The body keeps a scoreboard. I have learned to read it.

Then the doors started writing back. Mona remembered the exact same ritual I remembered. Kakul, a director at ISDM whose office I visited every Friday just to say hi, wrote that she is waiting to watch me own my space. Afsar bhai said he will remember my smile. I set out to give thanks. What came back was proof the caring was never one direction.

Other doors closed on their own. My student email became an alum email. My ISDM student mentor chapter ended, and a call with a new mentor is already set. Doors closing. Doors opening. Same week.

By the end of the week I understood what the reset actually was. Not dropping everything. Dropping the thoughts around everything. Close what is ready, and the noise goes with it.

Which brings me back to the question.

When are you leaving?

Here is the thing about Pao. He gives me a kind of strength I only knew from my dad. When I overthink, he says, don't think too much Nami, do it. You have the confidence. If you start something, you know how to close it.

A root does not ask what you are doing above the ground. It just holds you. 404 is that for me now. Home.

The notes were ready, so I wrote them. The email was ready, so it changed. 404 is not ready. So we stay.

Everything has a time. Close what is ready. Stay where the time has not come.

We don't know is not an answer we are avoiding. It is the rule, spoken honestly.

I wake up with an idea to spark the day. That is the whole plan for now.

Be kind, help people, trust muruga.