Home.

“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul” wrote Simone Weil in 1942 – a period characterized by war, death, refugees and homelessness. Perhaps this is too scholarly a start for a piece on home but I had to give some context to the quote.

We are a generation with a passion for travel and migration. Voluntarily, we’ve chosen to leave our familial homes to travel to far off places chasing success – money, a career, and a green card. Losing the ephemeral visa status and obtaining NRI (Non-Residential Indian) status meant hitting the jackpot. Forget home, forget family; sending money was enough. Pay for your parents’ flight tickets, pick your saree-clad mother up from the airport, cook them the dal whose ingredients you had to search far and wide for, and yet you have a dishwasher to clean up all the mess.

And suddenly, I find myself falling in love with Bollywood movies (!) and Old Hindi songs I used to roll my eyes at. Ten years after dropping Hindi for French, I spend my time trying to read Premchand’s stories, in the hopes that it’ll help improve my Hindi. I chastise myself for not trying harder to learn Telugu. Rosetta Stone, unfortunately, doesn’t even offer the language.

***

I’ve been gripped with vomit-inducing homesickness off late. It’s surprising to me that now, four years into my college education, I’ve been hit so hard with this feeling.

I still remember, three days into being at Brown, I woke up on a still bare mattress and faced a blank wall. I turned over and was greeted by the seeming opulence of my roommate’s side of the room. Her parents had helped her set up and she had a rug, posters, fairy lights hanging around her bed, and even a table lamp!

My stomach was rumbling. I hadn’t the time or energy, given my jetlag, to set up a bank account so I was scrapping off of the last few dollars my parents had given me. The patheticness of my predicament then hit me and I spent the rest of the morning crying while finishing an entire bottle of my ammamma’s homemade mango pickle, telling myself that it was the spice that had induced the tears, not my emotion.

I’m not trying to provoke any sympathy in you or anything, just trying to convey how much it sucked to have to move to a new country and set up a life entirely by yourself. Sure, I’d been exposed to “the west” via TV, social media, and popular cultural references, but the reality of it was far from the digital world. The cultural differences hit me in the smallest and oddest of ways. Confronting the hair care section in CVS, I found myself overwhelmed by the wide variety of choice I had. I think I spent about 15 minutes exploring all the shampoos, and then finally went back to just settling on the brand I was most familiar with.

I know I’m really lame… but seriously, the combination of a fever and jet lag really made the whole toiletry shopping experience quite exhausting.

What did I find myself going back to when I thought of home?

Food – because suddenly I became a hardcore cynic and deemed everything I ate as being bland. I yearned for the exhilarating smells of spices that haunt the kitchen at home. I even missed boarding school food which, in retrospect, was actually really good! That Wednesday lunch bisi bele bhath? Unbeatable.

Ben and Jerry’s was no match to Corner house, an ice-cream outlet indigenous to Bangalore. I’d tell some of my friends then and after we did some reminiscing of the mornings spent hungover at the Corner House in Airlines Hotel there’d be a last “but really, Ben and Jerry’s is better than Corner House… we’re just getting senti and denying it…” Yeah, we’re all thinking it but nothing can beat that Corner House hot chocolate fudge. Really.

And how could I forget Pecos (or Stones or Guzzlers or Chin Lung’s or Jimi’s or Purple Haze)! Diluted beer, stale popcorn, dingy lighting and the same classic rock all the time? YES, I’d pick that kind of sidey boozing over classy drinking any day.

Second: BANGALORE WEATHER because it really is the best of the big Indian cities. Every time the plane landed in Bangalore and the captain reported on the usual 25-30 degree Celsius range weather I’d sit in my seat stupidly grinning to myself. Walking out of the aircraft was such a momentous occasion because I’d be smacked with the humidity and mild heat and think to myself “AHHH, I’m home!!!!” while my hair frizzed up and contorted itself into something unrecognizable.

(But honestly speaking, I prefer the weather here in Providence: minimal humidity and a chill in the air. Heat is a big no-no for me).

Even getting shit from the immigration officer about my zero knowledge on Kannada would bring a smile to my face. Even the grunt I got in response to my cheery “thank you!” at the Hatti Kaapi stall outside the airport would make me happy. It’s such a dumb romanticization of everything but it was home. It was Namma Bengaluru even though I knew no Kannada and didn’t particularly enjoy the pollen-infused air and hated going into the city because the traffic is such a fucking nightmare.

But that blinding optimism starts to fade after a while and the realities of “home” start to hit me. Me not knowing Kannada is shameful, considering I’ve lived in Bangalore my whole life. On the bus, I’d stare hard at the floor while trying to block out the incomprehensible chatter. I’m the intruder, the outsider, who is contributing to the slow death of the language, and a hypocrite because that was the exact thing I hated most about the outside influences coming into Leh. The grunt responses to my courtesy are hurtful, and so telling of how suspicious and distrusting we all are of each other. The weather starts to bother me and my asthma is back. I miss being comfortable as a woman, being able to wear whatever I want in public. I miss my independence when I feel insecure about leaving the house after 7 pm. I hate the stares I get at alcohol shops, and most importantly – I miss the convenience of public restrooms! Displacement is often understood to be an act of forced (or voluntary) migration from one’s home country, but I felt a sense of displacement everywhere I went.

But it’s still home. It’s where I grew up.

But these were all just memories and nostalgia. Home isn’t a place; it’s a feeling, so inextricably linked to the notion of nativeness and a homeland. Nativeness, which can now be understood as the sovereign state we belong to. The naturalization of this can be seen in our everyday conception of home via “soil”, having roots, a country you belong to. Think of other metaphorical practices: kissing the soil of one’s homeland (ref: first shot of Mother India), taking a bit of soil from your country – all demonstrations of loyalty to your nation. The understanding of a “Motherland” as one that with a deeply rooted genealogical tree suggests territorial rootedness. You can’t be a part of more than one tree, right? This conception, of a “native homeland” to belong to ascribes it as a moral and spiritual need, which is disrupted when one is uprooted from one’s culture.

I decided to take some time off for myself today. Sitting by the water in India Point Park, I thought to myself

If I squint and look far enough into the horizon, I can see Bangalore.

No, no, I can’t.

I then had a profound realization. As cliché as it sounds, home really is within us. As Maya Angelou so eloquently put it

“I believe that one can never leave home. I believe that one carries the shadows, the dreams, the fears and dragons of home under one’s skin, at the extreme corners of one’s eyes and possibly in the gristle of the earlobe”

And really, home was all around me in the subtlest of ways. When I choose to store my lentils in empty bottles of wine, that’s a take away from home. Basking in the morning sun, with a steaming cup of chai in my hand, leaves me with the most fulfilling contentment. Providence is starting to feel like home to me.

Being completely sound with oneself, the ability to relish your solitude… Home is that youthful region where we are the only enfranchised citizens. We can “be grownups” and buy cars and get married and own houses and act fancy and drink champagne but really, we’re safest in that special place deep within us; that special place where we can fully belong and where the child inside us retreats to and continues to live on, “still as innocent and shy as a magnolia”.