The Kindle magazine has an issue on the global refugee crisis this month. I write on an issue I have thought about on and off for many years now - that of what home means to someone who has migrated from one place to the other, for whatever reason. Can it ever be "Home", with a capital H? Or is it an illusion of home we create in the new place? Isn't the home we leave behind an illusion as well?
Read the column here. Or see below.
HALFWAY HOMES
We design the idea of home to be fluid, to be like water, to pour and flow and fill any space that we inhabit.
Read the column here. Or see below.
HALFWAY HOMES
We design the idea of home to be fluid, to be like water, to pour and flow and fill any space that we inhabit.
Come this new year and its month of May, it will be a decade
for me, living in this big city. Ten years since university, ten years since
moving to neighbourhoods larger than my whole district, ten years of
navigations and heartbreaks and loves and fears and joys and changes. Maybe I
can start calling Bangalore home now. Or maybe I never will call it home.
Back then, even when it was a land of opportunities, it felt
like a transit place, a pit stop in between graduation and ‘something else’.
That something else was always a return to the roots, of sorts. The pit stop
has extended a decade now and unless I keep calling it not-home, I worry that
it will extend another decade or two. No. No. No.
A lot of people I know are migrants, from smaller towns and
villages to this city and other cities. Driven as we are by the glitz of being
happily away from families to do as we please, driven by the job offers we are
made, driven by the glamour of choosing to be as free as we would like to be
every damn day, I and thousands like me have made these heartless, soulless
cities ‘home’. There is a wonderful little word in Havyaka, a little known
dialect that my community speaks. ‘Bidaara’,
with a sharp emphasis on the ‘DA’. It translates to ‘house’ but is often meant
to denote a temporary, most times a rented place before you move up the
socio-economic ladder and get married and buy a home or rent a bigger, posher
house with an extra bedroom for when parents visit and utility area for the
washing machine and a balcony for the mandatory holy basil plant and all that. Some
of us spent entire lives in these bidaaras, moving from one to the other, from
a 1BHK to a 2BHK, from this neighbourhood to the slightly better one where the
schools are nearby and supermarkets are aplenty. These carry the hopes of never
calling this or this city home. Calling it that is wringing the neck of hope
and settling for here, where your heart never is. Let us never call this home.
How long does it take before the others, the ‘locals’ begin
to consider you one of their own? Very long, it seems, going by the way things
happen in your city and mine.
A dear friend from a neighbouring state has been
here for as nearly as long as he was ‘home’, speaks the local tongue, albeit a
little broken and has lived all over the city, in its north and south parts.
Yet he is still an outsider, neither here nor at home, at home. Decades can go
by and these things will never change, no matter what the effort you put in, it
sometimes feels like.
We are the privileged ones, we the migrants of this sort.
The exodus from Syria and elsewhere and the devastation it brings, the lifelong
scars that it gashes against the soul is impossible to imagine. At a microcosmic
level, arrogance would permit me to say that leaving home is leaving home for
everyone, either them or me. But of course that is a ridiculous notion. I can
always go back home, to a safe place and be that girl in the hills again.
Privileges that I, we have taken soundly for granted.
Does home remain just that? Amongst the very few quotes I
can quote, this is one. “You can never go home again, but the truth is you
can never leave home, so it's all right” by that gorgeous woman Maya
Angelou. Somehow, back home, while the walls and the gardens and the pets and
trees remain the same, older certainly, but same-same, something has changed
with every visit back. Perhaps it is just me, I have changed. The city and this
hard life here have taken something away, even when it gave so much. As it
always happens.
Back home, the walls don’t whisper old secrets and crazy
stories anymore. Or perhaps I fall asleep too quickly to listen. The foxes that
hooted into the night somewhere on Stewart Hill bang behind my house and gave
me company when I devoured book after book every night, till 2, till 3, till ma
yelled have gone elsewhere. Perhaps to the other side of the hill where there
are fewer lights and fewer houses and people and chicken coops are not so
securely fastened that they can’t steal even one at night. The winter wind that
whirled around the microwave signal tower, shrill and much like the wail of a
banshee – we warned guests who stayed the night about her – she is gone too.
That is because the tower is gone now, after some fifty odd years and all that
remains is an abandoned building, covered in moss and black soot where the boys
in town go to smoke and drink beer and watch the sun go down over the hills of
Kodagu.
The hills are there and so are the fig trees I learnt to
climb trees on and the pond and the house and my room from where I can see the
sun rise. Yet, there is still…a void?...a vacumm?...an emptiness…? I can’t be
sure. I don’t want to be.
Home is a myth, I read somewhere. Perhaps it was Adichie,
longing through her woman character and reducing brilliantly to a phrase all
that home means to a migrant. It is never where you are from, it is rarely
where you are at or will be. It is a dream, a nostalgia, a foolish wish that
you know can never be fulfilled. But we migrants are the adaptable sorts. We
design the idea of home to be fluid, to be like water, to pour and flow and
fill any space that we inhabit. Thus, home is the red yoga mat that I hold on
to, despite how old and slippery it is today, for like the safety of home, it
has seen me through it all. Home is the few books I can never send back to the
home library, for in them lies the stories of comfort, of people I bought it
with or read it with. Home is the cheap plastic figurine of a Radhe-Krishna
that even the agnostic in me cannot let go of. Home is a badly framed, hastily
made painting that was my first art buy and that has followed me into all the
houses I have lived in. Home is the inscribed ring on my finger, the silver
keyring that holds my house keys, the yellow fountain pen and this and that and
all this, the sentiments and memories, bad and good and everything in between
that we carry along like extra baggage. And in these concepts of fluidity do we
build a home, we outsiders.
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