Home

Home… this word brings in a lot of images inside my head, the most prominent being that of an enclosed space with rooms and people living in it. It’s been long that I have been wanting to write about this, to try and define it. What do we mean when we say “I don’t feel home” or when we say “I’m going home.”  It is subjective, the concept of home. Most of my vacations are spent travelling from one place to the other. It is only during the four month long semesters of college that I stay in a single place, that is one time when I don’t travel. Hence, for me defining home is quite difficult. I shuffle often between places and each of them make me comfortable in their own different ways. 

Again the question arises, which place shall I call home.

Having spent my youth in Bhutan I have an undeniably strong affection and attachment to that place. Even the photos of Bhutan evoke beautiful memories in me. Then I’ve spent almost six months at my cousin’s place in Kerala. That was the first six months that I had spent in my motherland with my people, traditional Kerala cuisine, temple visits and our own religious festivals. It was in itself a wonderful experience. Then I moved to Hyderabad, a place where I started living alone, in a hostel with a bunch of strangers. Before I knew I had become fairly independent, learnt cooking and started washing huge bed covers all on my own (Yes, that is an important part of living alone.) Soon my sister moved to Bangalore and spending vacations with her became a delight in itself. Have I mentioned enough places already?

My sejour in a place never lasts long, but I make the most out of the little time available and make it memorable with a couple of photos and events worth cherishing. At a point in my life, just to avoid this ambiguity I started defining home as “the place where my parents are”. For a very long time, this was reassuring. But no longer. I feel the need to redefine what home is.

How should I define it, so that I can carry it around with me wherever I am?

After putting in a lot of thought into it over a period of time, I have realized or I prefer now to say that “home” is more of a feeling. For me it is no more a physical concept of an edifice with four walls and a couple of rooms. It is a profound feeling of belonging. In my mind I have simplified it by giving it the most complex of characters. I have made it a psychological image which I can carry along wherever I go.

Sometimes if we are lucky enough, it all comes down to one person or a group of people. we find a home in them. In these people we find acceptance. We know that we are being taken in forever with all that in us, and it doesn’t require us to change ourselves in any way. It is what you call in French ‘sens d’appartenance’ (sense of belonging). Many a times when I enter our house in Kerala where we stay only for short periods in a year, I do not feel that I belong there. It is dusty, filled with cobwebs and when my sound echoes in the void, I feel nothing. I clean the place and leave it as I had come in. I don’t feel like staying there for long, unless there are people to share it with me. Someone to fill the void and add in their sounds to make a conversation.

I identify myself with a lot of places, I cannot call myself a true Keralite or a half-Bhutanese, hence at every step I ask myself where do I actually belong. For such a person, finding a home within someone is actually an exquisite feeling in itself. To feel that someone is worthy enough to call them a home. To find comfort in the fact that I can identify myself with that person and feel comfortable in that person’s aura. Be somewhere nearby them and feel that yes, I’m home.

It has always been a quest to seek for a home. It was a sense of fulfillment to have found a home in one person. In this populous world it is sheer luck to find all those comforting factors in a single person. To imagine that there you can build your own house. Within that one person. Build a house and then build a world. On tiring days when you feel the worst, you can just come home, to that one person and seek shelter. Without walls and rooms, it’s a home in itself with all the beauty and warmth that it gives, a person’s heart. Do we call it falling in love? Are we exactly in love or have we found something invaluable? It is that feeling of triumph, of having found that invaluable person in life, whom you know that you cannot miss out on.

Slowly, as the comfort increases, we attribute everything to them. And yes, we fall in love with that home. A home that protects, nourishes and provides all that we crave for in the little amount of time that we exist. For those countable number of days when we breathe, love and seek. More so, it is acceptance that we need the most in a home. Because in the day, we are out fighting the world and making a stand in a crowd and when the day wanes, it is home that we crave for. Somewhere to just crawl in without questions, answers or much complications.

Then again, with this feeling of solace comes a fear. It is a fear of losing that comfortable place. A fear that needs to be fought against every single day. Even when repeatedly reassured, that fear grips on and sinks in every day and keeps you on the edge. Sometimes I feel like bracing against all sorts of human attachments possible, but when I realize how impossible that is, I choose to fight on. To tell myself that the home is not going anywhere and I can drop my guards. Yet somewhere in a little corner of my heart there is this devil showing me a parallel world where the home is suddenly taken away, it shows me a picture of how things might turn out, or how it’ll be. I admit, it is scary.

For now, I’m cleaning cobwebs, setting in my luggage, folding my cloths neatly and making sure that the curtains are perfect for the lighting. I am accepting the fact that I have found a home where I can unpack and sometimes even afford to leave things messy. After all a home is where you can be the worst and the best. I need to bring in fairy lights, and a couple of lampshades for I think the paint demands a change in décor. But it’s beautiful already and I have stopped searching for a home.

This journey has been rugged, and I have trudged along enough. Finally, all little lights have guided me to where I am. So at the moment I am happy. A part of me still braces me for all happenings. But the large part of me, likes the fact that I have finally found what I have been searching for.

This feeling of fulfillment, this ‘sens d’appartenance’, this home -it is wonderful. Maybe all you need to do is pause for a moment and think of that home, who knows you might already be living in one.