THE visa stamp is beautiful. There it sits regally amid the hopeful pages of your passport, the promise of a tomorrow that takes place elsewhere, the dividing line of a now two-part life. You take it out when you’re alone, smooth your fingers over its surface, sniff its ink for clues to the much-imagined but yet unseen. It is the fruit of your trepidation, plucked from the ends of dread-filled lines where you stood flanked by the similarly humiliated, papers in hand, answers in mind. It has proven so many wrong: the cousin who insisted you would never get it, the already-abroad aunt who refused to help. The destination does not matter; it is the exit that is the gift.

The state of being ‘nearly departed’ is a wondrous one in all the cares that it renders impotent. The magic of impending departure can detox the most noxious neighbour, make loadshedding into a fun-filled picnic and parental lectures deeply enjoyable. That friend who always got on your nerves, the one with the always-nicer car, the always-newer clothes, the always-funnier joke — that friend will no longer bother you. The cavorts of the boss’s son that sucked the life out of your day is nothing when you consider the resignation letter you will soon slam on his desk.

This enumerating of miseries is essential; it is the argument for your departure — your only antidote against nostalgia, your one repository against regret. In them is what the author John Berger termed the truth of all migrants: that leaving is the act of moving by those who could not move the circumstances around them — those who were hemmed in by birth, by status, language or faith and so were forced to move themselves.

The luxurious limbo of being nearly departed is the migrant’s best moment. On the cusp of leaving, the student and the businessman, the bride and the construction worker, can grasp at infinity. The pains of the present are rendered temporary, soon to expire and the future is too far to evaluate, too remote for criticism.

While the leave-taking is triumphant, its bravado will expire soon at the end of the same plane ride that began with eager instructions, the last-minute calls to the mother to take her medicine, to the little brother to study hard. Everything can be said except that you do not want to leave; that you are afraid, that parting may be forever. The departing must believe this deception even as they perform it; it is at the core of their bravado.

Their burdens are betrayed, instead, by what they carry. Newlyweds will confer on whether to list on forms the cans of kebabs tucked between neatly folded dupattas, the boxes of sweets rolled up in a pair of pants, the forbidden food items that make home last just a little longer — familiar tastes insulating against an unrelenting newness that surrounds them.

Some will fiddle with their iPhones, the promised continuity between here and there promised by the phone dealer in Saddar or Clifton or Liberty Market. Facebook and gmail are everywhere, crucial crutches that will become lifelines and for some the architecture of denial where they can pretend to be where they could not stand to be. Food and Facebook consumed together can almost reproduce home.

The tragedy of migration is not in the leaving or even the arriving but in the returning home. It is at this moment that the migrant, having wandered near or far, for a year or a decade, prodigal son or dutiful daughter, will all discover the curse curled up in absence. In the streets that look just a bit different, the friends that slap your back almost like they used to, the food that tastes nearly like it should — in these disappointments of return they will decipher the demise of home.

At the end of that awaited journey, counted down by months, weeks, hours, after an absence padded with emails and phone calls, dreams and expectations, they confront homelessness. They know then that home stopped living long ago, the day they left, the day it was frozen forever in memory, no longer permitted to change or live.

The migrants who return come immersed in anguished calculations, adding and subtracting what they did not account for: the loneliness, the three jobs, the meandering friendships, against the nicer house, the forever air-conditioning, the Gap T-shirts.

All migrants are actors; they cannot but be, the golden days of the homebound trip sustaining the sweaty labourer under the desert sun and the stressed-out banker under fluorescent lamps. The journey home is their stage, and on arrival they must again perform, satisfy one and all that while the home they sought may be gone, they have stayed the same. Not fatter or thinner, no more snobbish or less funny, not too picky or more condescending but just exactly, victoriously, the same.

The tragedy of migration then is not just the death of home but the sentence of stagnation. If home dies when the migrant leaves, so does the migrant. The new person, not the smug nearly departed but the reality-worn gypsy, yearning for one pillow and another bed, cannot ever return or perhaps be known to those left behind. Return is permitted only to the soul untouched by displacement, the admission of change in home, the acknowledgment that the transaction of distance was perhaps too costly and the survival now so possible maybe just a little or a lot less worthy.

And so to those nearly departed, the many who ache to leave, to chase opportunity and find security; whose names and lineages do not translate to hope at home, here in these sentences are some premonitions of what may come.

The writer is a US-based attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy. rafia.zakaria@gmail.com