It is evening, two days before we leave, and I am sitting on the couch with my laptop.
I should probably be doing something practical. Packing, finishing work, checking whether I have ordered everything we need. Instead, I am thinking about Rishikesh.
In two days, I will be there again.
This time, it has been two years. Since I first went to Rishikesh, I have never stayed away for this long. Sometimes I was gone for a few months, sometimes almost a year, but I always returned.
Two years feels different.
A lot can happen in two years. Businesses grow. Shops move. Children suddenly look like completely different children. New people arrive and somehow become part of a place that existed perfectly well before them.
But I am not sitting here worrying that everything will have changed. I am excited. Really excited.
Because Rishikesh changes, yes, but there is also something that always seems to remain. Especially by the Ganges. I do not really know how to explain it without making it sound more mystical than I mean it. The river has its own energy. Every time I return, no matter how long I have been away, it is still there.
The Ganges is the Ganges.
This time we are arriving at the end of the monsoon, which is a very particular moment to be there. The river will be full, the hills impossibly green, everything still carrying months of rain. The monsoon has its own intensity, and afterwards there is this energy in the landscape that feels almost too alive.
I am looking forward to that. To the river, the wet green hills, the air. To seeing what is different and what somehow is not.
Mostly, I am looking forward to the people.
I want to see the old faces. I want to know how they are, what happened, how their businesses have developed. Maybe the small shop became a bigger one. Maybe somebody started something new. Maybe the plan they had the last time I saw them changed completely.
I want to see how much the children have grown. That is always the most brutal evidence of time, actually. Adults can look more or less the same after a year or two. Then they start talking and you realise how much has happened. With children, you see it immediately. They are taller. Their faces are different. They speak differently. Suddenly there is a whole new person standing where your memory kept a much smaller one.
And I am thinking about Chico.
Chico is a dog from the older side of Rishikesh, across the Ganges from Tapovan. Calling him “our dog” would not be correct. He is a very local dog. The dogs there are fed and known by the people around them. They belong to the streets, the neighbourhood and their own routines.
But during lockdown, Chico more or less lived with my ex and me.
He would come inside, eat, drink an unbelievable amount of water and then sleep. Sometimes for seventeen hours. Just sleep. Completely finished with the world.
He was such a strong dog. He still is, I hope, but of course he must be older now.
The strange thing is that he always recognises me. Every time I return, he is happy, and every time there is this moment when he cannot understand why he cannot come with me. He looks at me as if I am making a very obvious mistake. We have found each other again, so naturally he should come home with me now.
And I cannot explain to a dog that I do not really live there anymore. Or that he does. That his life belongs to this side of Rishikesh in a way mine no longer does.
I keep wondering how he is after two years. Whether he still walks through the same streets. Whether he will recognise me again.
I think he will.
But I do not know what I will find, and I do not want to turn the not-knowing into something sad before I am even there. Maybe Chico will simply appear, slightly older and still completely offended that I have once again failed to organise my life around taking him with me.
My daughter experiences all of this differently.
For me, Rishikesh already exists in several versions. There is Upper Tapovan, where my yoga school was. There is the older Rishikesh on the other side of the Ganges. There is lockdown Rishikesh, pregnancy Rishikesh, and the Rishikesh we brought our daughter to when she was only eight weeks old.
For her, there are no clear versions like that.
She has been there, but she does not remember it. Her first months are connected to Rishikesh through my memory, not hers. So she is returning to a place she has already lived in, while experiencing it as somewhere completely new.
I find that so strange.
Two years is the longest I have ever been away from Rishikesh. For her, two years are an enormous part of her whole life. I measure the time through everything that happened between my last visit and now. She measures time in sleeps, birthdays and whether something happened when she was “little.”
I will arrive looking for people, places and feelings I remember. She will arrive and look at whatever is directly in front of her.
I may be having a whole emotional moment by the Ganges, and she may urgently need a snack.
Actually, that is quite likely.
Maybe she will notice the monkeys, the cows, a dog, the noise, some tiny object on the ground. Maybe I will try to show her something that matters deeply to me and she will be interested for seven seconds. Then years later, the thing she remembers may be something I barely noticed.
That is another reason I cannot imagine the return properly. I am not returning alone. Her attention will change the place for me, too.
She will meet Rishikesh without knowing how many parts of our life started there.
I originally went for a yoga teacher training in Upper Tapovan. I met my ex there. I spent the strange, suspended months of the pandemic there. I became pregnant there.
During lockdown, I began making jewellery myself and selling it through Instagram. I would not say I discovered my love for jewellery there because the love was probably already present. I lived it there. That is closer.
It became something I did with my hands. Something I could make, photograph, put online and send to another person. It was no longer only me loving jewellery or collecting ideas. It became real in a small, imperfect way.
Astrology also became part of my life in Rishikesh.
And then there were all the women.
Rishikesh attracts women from everywhere, often carrying very different lives with them. I met women who had gone through things I could never have imagined. Women who were healing, changing, starting again, building something or trying to understand what had just happened to them.
Some of them turned their stories into beautiful businesses.
I do not mean that every painful thing needs to become a business. Or that suffering becomes valuable only when you build something from it. It was simply something I noticed there: how a woman could take everything she had lived through—beautiful, painful, messy, sometimes completely unbelievable—and create a new form from it.
There was something alchemical in that. Not polished. Not always calm. But alive.
Those stories stayed with me. I think they became part of the inspiration for LIANA before I knew that LIANA would exist.
At the time, none of this arrived as one clear founding story. I was not walking around Rishikesh thinking, this will become my brand one day. I went there for yoga. Then I met someone. Then there was a pandemic. Then I made jewellery. Then astrology entered more deeply. Then I became pregnant. Then I returned with an eight-week-old baby.
It was not a plan. It was just my life happening.
Only now, looking back, I can see how many threads were already there.
And now I am returning with my daughter and with a jewellery brand that did not exist then—not in a way I could have named, anyway.
I know this could be written as a perfect circle. I left with an idea, and now I return with the brand and the child and everything makes sense.
But that would be too neat.
I do not feel as if I am closing a circle. It feels more like returning to a place where many parts of my life began moving, and seeing what they look like from here.
And also seeing what everyone else’s life looks like now.
Rishikesh did not remain inside my memory waiting for me. The people continued. Their children grew. Their businesses changed. Chico got older. Other women arrived with stories I have never heard. New people opened doors, fell in love, stayed longer than planned or got lost and somehow ended up belonging there.
Some of them may become part of my life this time.
That is one of the things I love most about travel. There are people who mean nothing to me today only because I have not met them yet. In a few weeks, someone may have become part of my consciousness. A face I think about, a story I remember, a person who shifts something without either of us noticing at the time.
Maybe nothing enormous will happen. I am not expecting Rishikesh to hand me another life-changing chapter because I booked a flight.
I am simply curious.
Curious about the old faces and the new ones. About the children who are not little anymore. About the businesses that grew and the ideas that disappeared. About Chico. About how my daughter will see a place she once lived in but cannot remember.
Curious about the end of the monsoon and that first moment by the river.
And curious about what Rishikesh will give me this time.
I do not know yet.
I am still on the couch, two days before leaving, with work to finish and probably far too many things left to pack.
Rishikesh is still ahead of me.