I’m Not At Home
On belongingness, a place called Delhi, and the meaning of home as a married woman.
“Why don’t you write more often?” I’m asked.
Perhaps they mean to ask why I don’t publish more often, because rarely have I ever stopped writing. Believe me when I tell you that I’m brimming with a million ideas, swimming in a sea of unfinished drafts.
To the question I respond simply, “Because I’m not at home”.
A few days ago, I flew across one home to the other, as I do many times a year. In the days leading up to the departure from one and arrival at the other, I’m always a little flustered. To minimise the ordeal of packing, I stock one of nearly every essential item in each home. Laptop, appendant keyboard and mouse, coffee equipment, loungewear, airline socks (nothing compares!), bathroom sundries, household appliances, etc. But some of my belongings are unique, irreplaceable, refusing to be categorised under the elusive “etcetera”.
Despite my best efforts, I spend the eve of travel on the ritual of packing, pondering where these one-off things should stay—with me, or where I am not. As I handle each item, a melange of nostalgia, guilt and sorrow washes over me. “Am I going to want this when I’m away?”, I ask myself. It would help to know how long I’ll be away, where I am only visiting, and where I actually stay. But I deliberately defer those decisions. The moment I decide, I will, of course, resolve the enduring dilemma, but I will also rip my heart into two parts, leaving one behind in each home, going about my way only half-heartedly. Try as I may to duplicate most things, I can only be in one place at a time.
When I return to either home after a hiatus, it takes me days to get my bearings together, to grow accustomed to the peculiar sounds and sights of each space, to set up my writing station, and to wipe away the layers of dust that have accumulated on my belongings. The dust bears witness to my absence, scoffs at me for having left.
If you’ve been reading my work for some time, making it through the dense word count of each essay, then you will be familiar with the plight of my living situation—I live between two homes, one each in Delhi and Bangalore. Some may believe this to be a problem of plenty, but I see it as the agony of having to choose. In choosing one, you reject the other. And, so, I exist in both homes simultaneously: corporeally in one, and in the silhouette of my absence in the other.
Am I going home?
Sometime last year, I was on a flight from Portland (Oregon) to Houston (a city of some significance in my personal history, perhaps deserving of its own piece). As the aircraft touched down at George Bush Intercontinental, the crew customarily announced the weather conditions, delivered instructions for passengers for whom this was a connecting flight, and concluded with a message for those whose destination was Houston: “If this is home, then welcome home”.
To ponder the question of home is a luxury afforded in a society with privilege and prosperity. You’ll rarely ever hear anything like this in an official announcement in India, where the relentless struggle for survival leaves little room for such contemplation, making the feeling of truly being 'at home' a rare experience.
Imagine if they made such announcements each time I touched down in Delhi and in Bangalore. Whenever my usual Delhi-Bangalore-Delhi flight is mid-air, I look out the window and find myself wondering whether I’m going towards home or away from it. On which leg of the journey am I returning home, and on which am I departing? Perhaps I know the answer, but I’m afraid to admit it to myself. Because, as a married woman, I am expected to have only one home.
On moving around
Let me guess. You were born someplace. You grew up someplace else. You went to school somewhere, but you got a job elsewhere. Maybe, if you identify as one gender, you moved home in the aftermath of an event called a wedding. If none of this happened, then perhaps you moved around a lot growing up because your parents moved around a lot, switching jobs, moving home, rotating their circle of friends. None of this happened for me.
Even though it is more than acceptable (in India), if not simply encouraged, to live with family for as long as you possibly can, I can hardly think of anyone who hasn’t had to move house, city and country in pursuit of a lofty, socially sanctioned goal. If you desire to live independently (i.e. away from family), you must have a very good reason to relocate. If you do relocate, you must not allow yourself to wonder where you belong. It is always to be known, reiterated untiringly in the customs and traditions that we take with us everywhere we go.
As a culture, we aspire to home ownership above all else, never quite allowing ourselves to reclaim the walls and the corners of rented accommodation. Very often, when I enter a space with spartan decor, I learn quickly that this is a rented home, and the residents don’t concern themselves with doing it up. It doesn’t matter that they’ve lived there for years, and may continue to live there for much longer. They care most about whom the space belongs to, and their home doesn’t belong to them for as long as they don’t own it.
A place I used to call home
To say that Delhi is home is hardly inaccurate. I was born and raised in Delhi, never having left. I went to school, college, university here; the only semblance of real, in-person jobs I have ever had have been here; my closest relationships have seeded, blossomed and ended here. Interestingly, two of my alma maters, my first home, and my now-home, happen to be located in a straight line along a street that’s about four kilometres long. And, so, it’s hardly inaccurate to say that my life belongs here.
My ‘first’ home is where I was born and raised, uninterruptedly inhabiting it until I was almost twenty-three. That home had never belonged to anyone before it did to us. There were no ghosts of residents past. I would gladly reclaim the walls each time they were painted over. There was a shelf on my bedstead that watched me grow up; it held stuffed animals (a prized wombat, in particular) that gave way to high school romance novels, which gave way to a line of nail polish in every colour, which then dried up and crusted over, to finally be replaced by literary fiction. In that home, I learnt how to walk and how to drive, and everything in between and beyond. Some may say that I lived in the same house too long, and it was the humdrum that had begun to ail me.
One day in the year 2011, my family decided to move house. They took this decision in the name of practicality, to be closer to places of work and the like. In anticipation of my grand protestations, I hadn’t been told that we were moving. Not until the very day. They were able to pull this off because the other home was already furnished, and there wasn’t much we needed to do to start living there without having to stop living here.
This was the first instance of moving home in my life. I felt unimaginably dislocated. It didn’t matter that we were moving into what was unanimously described as the most palatial living arrangement in Delhi. Why we moved and where we went (we didn’t leave Delhi, of course) is a story for another time.
I was told we were only going to spend one night at the new home, that we would be back the next day, and that we were free to come back whenever we wanted. This home wasn’t going anywhere, I was assured.
That first night became a forever night, and we never returned to stay. In the weeks and months that followed, for nearly two years, I didn't move my things out of my first home. I would come back every week, not only to pick up a new set of things but also to replace the old ones. In those days, home was where my things were. It was around that time that I had a growing affinity for Tibetan literature, for writings that explored life in exile. In many ways, my preoccupation with the place called home finds its origin in this episode, growing disproportionately large when the city of Bangalore came into my life.
It’s been nearly thirteen years, yet every single nightly dream that I recall is set in that home. In the dream, the home appears cold, abandoned, sparsely furnished. I know that they say that home is where the heart is, but sometimes home is where all your dreams are set.
In the city of Delhi
“The citizens of Delhi do little to endear themselves to anyone,” writes Khushwant Singh in his novel Delhi. Delhi can be difficult, yet I haven’t found a city more welcoming of cultural diversity. The city is cosmopolitan in a sense that I haven't found many other cities to be.
When you are at home in a city, you are oblivious to its offerings. Like all things at home, I took the city for granted, never seeing it for beyond its limitations. The sprawling gardens that gladly engulf the city, the public parks that dot its map, the manner in which the roads meander around the centuries-old monuments, the quaint buildings, the glorious museums—they were invisible to me. It’s only when I found myself stuck in tortuous traffic jams on the uninspiring roads of Bangalore that I realised what I had lost in leaving Delhi.
I have lived in Delhi all along, but it’s not that I haven’t had glimpses of what it’s like to be elsewhere. I have had brief spells of packing my things into a single, medium-sized suitcase and living elsewhere for at most one, two, three, sometimes four months, at a time. In 2013, I spent six months in the city of Houston. On all such visits, the suitcase has never left my side. I pull things out, put things back, never quite unpacking. When your life fits into the dimensions of a suitcase, you’re not really moving; you’re only visiting.
I am sometimes asked when I moved to Bangalore, now that I am married and my partner lives in Bangalore. My response betrays the uncertainty in my voice. Sometimes, when it feels safe, I add that I haven't really moved, because I don’t know where I live and where I am merely a visitor.
Homelessness in the world
The first post that I ever published on Substack was penned with a great sense of urgency, in the throes of the protests against CAA-NRC that were raging across the country. A vast segment of the population was threatened to be displaced overnight, solely on their inability to produce a document. It haunts me that the place that you have inhabited for generations can suddenly no longer be yours. All it takes is one despotic regime, one vote at a time, until you can vote no more.
Although this piece hovers on my sense of dislocation, I dare not appropriate the term ‘homelessness’ for myself. The events unfolding around the world for the past several months (and even longer) tell us that we have grown disturbingly desensitised to the horror of homelessness. We are immune to the scenes of terror and sorrow that regularly appear on our social media feed.
How do you know that your home will always be yours? The fact is that you don’t. Homelessness isn’t just the state of being without a home; it is a horror, a living nightmare.
A couple of weeks ago, I was waiting at a traffic signal in Delhi. The city was shrouded in its characteristic winter fog, while I was ensconced in the warmth of my private vehicle. There was a knock on my window; an elderly gentleman waited on the other side of the glass wall. He was asking for money.
We, as residents of Delhi, have grown painfully accustomed to the sight of the homeless who knock on the window to rupture our reverie. They persistently engage with you, not allowing you a moment of comfort until you relent. They insist on delivering their monologue, outlining their perception of you, the reasons you should part with your money, and how you stand to benefit if you do so.
Very often, if you’re in the car with a companion, they will comment on what they think is the nature of your relationship with that person. Almost always, they have gauged correctly. Theirs is a life of peering into the windows of other worlds.
Rarely with cash on hand, I have no choice but to either refuse or to ignore these requests that are so forceful that they’re bordering on extortion. The discomfort evoked by the stark contrast between their world and mine is too difficult to ignore, and these episodes—although frequent—scathe me for days.
Now that I’ve set the context for my non-Indian readers, let’s return to when the elderly man showed up at my window. He was a turbaned Sikh gentleman, an anomaly on the street. He was waddling from window to window, urging people to help him pay for an ‘injection’ for the pain in his knees. His request was rather specific. It wasn’t simply for food. It wasn’t simply for warm clothes. His Hindi was punctuated with words in English. He didn’t look like he belonged there. And that broke my heart into a million little pieces in a way that I can barely bring myself to explain.
How do we decide who belongs on the street, and who deserves to be at home?
There’s only so much that I can wax eloquently about the feeling of homelessness, so I’m going to consolidate some excerpts of my explorations of home that you will find across the various essays I’ve published before.
I unpack my suitcase most languidly, attempting in vain to preserve the smell of holiday laundry as it threatens to mingle with the indistinct smell of my own wardrobe. As I pull things out of the suitcase and put each one back in its place, I suffer a special kind of pain. The party is over. It’s time to go home. Only if I knew which place to call home.
You can read the full post here.
On being in Bangalore
Being at home may have nothing to do with the writing process, but it may also have everything to do with it.
I’m now in the other home, in another bedroom, on another bed, on a different side of it. It doesn’t matter which one this is. When I talk about the pain of living across two homes, I’m often chided for having the problem of plenty. You have a boundless buffet of gourmet foods! Pick what you like, as often as you like! What are you lacking? But here I am, wailing about having lost the ability to tell hunger from satiety.
Where am I visiting, where am I staying? Is it where most of my stuff is? Is it where most of my life has been? Or is it where there’s agency? Is it where I sleep better, or is it where I spend my waking hours in peace?
When I lay in bed after a long day of unfinished work, I don’t feel relief. I resist laying down for as long as I can. Maybe that’s why I refuse to get into bed before four am. Going to bed is like admitting defeat.
In each home, there’s a unique set of sounds that disrupts my feather-light sleep. In this home, I am awakened by a barrage of sensory assaults. The brilliance of the six am sun leaks into my east-facing bedroom through the gaps in the blackout curtain. Then there’s the ambient noise of vehicular traffic that rattles and honks therefore it is. A little later, I am assaulted by the shrill cries of children at play, screaming at the top of their lungs as if childhood is the nicest time of their lives. They’ll know better when they grow up.
We live in a neighbourhood where everyone is about our age, which is why nearly every household has a child resident. Everyone around here seems to live by the template, and it’s all frighteningly homogenous. Go to school, get a job, get married, procreate, raise children, taunt those who don’t want to live by the template, watch tv, die.
Not a single hour of daylight goes by without the sound of a welding machine or a hammer making its way through my skull, a phenomenon peculiar to ‘developing’ cities. We’ve lived in this home for nearly six years, and in all the time that we’ve spent here, I don't recall a single day of restful silence. If nothing else, the residents break into song and dance on the occasion of a Hindu festival, when all the residents convene to celebrate how much they resemble each other. My partner and I represent the heteronormative majority in very many ways, yet we feel out of place in this residential complex because we’re not living by a template. Over the years, I have watched this neighbourhood morph into a frighteningly homogeneous assembly of “family residents”. They’re only seeking more of their kind, omitting and ousting anyone who threatens the norm. Like all quasi-public spaces, these residential societies, too, create barriers to entry.
Now that Netflix no longer permits password-sharing in India, I must pick a household as my home. It doesn’t matter what the world thinks, when even Netflix believes that home is only one place. Not one place at a time, as I was trying to believe it is, but one place, forever. Home is not where I am, but it is where I can’t be.
You can read the full post here.
Your relationship to your home, I realised in one of my quietly epiphanic moments, can be understood through your feelings towards the front door. Home is the place that either beckons you to enter or tempts you to escape. Which side of that door would you rather be on?
Does your stomach sink before you step in? Does your heart flutter before you step out? Do you wear the same kind of clothes on either side of that door? What kind of lock do you put on that door? Is it a glass door, or is it an opaque and impenetrable block of solid wood? Maybe you didn’t have a choice there. Home is also where you live with that which you haven’t (always) chosen.”
You can read the full post here.
You’ll find me at home
I married in the year of the pandemic. As if the pandemic hadn't already reshaped my relationship with home (albeit beautifully), marriage added some complexity to the mix. Until then, I had only ever visited my partner who lived in Bangalore; no one expected me to live here. I hadn’t considered a live-in arrangement, only because I valued having a room of my own to return to. In the aftermath of marriage, the expectations changed. I am now expected to be in Bangalore for longer periods, if not all the time. I couldn’t point to any one person who explicitly expects me to act differently because I am married. But that’s the thing about marriage; it’s so insidious that you can never point to the source of the angst it generates in women.
Back when my partner and I were dating, my trips to Bangalore were only ‘visits’. The change in my marital status has also altered the nomenclature of my trips—I no longer visit, but stay in Bangalore, even when I spend the bulk of my time in Delhi. When I used to visit, I was expected to return, for no reason in particular. No one expects me to return anymore. It’ll be nice if I do, but it won’t matter if I don’t, because, like a dutiful wife, I must accept this as my home, as my place in the world, for no particular reason.
conversation with a city, wah
Richa, your essay, as often your writings do, make one relook at taken- for- granted ideas. I am wondering if we can take going between two homes as representing two aspects of one's psyche. What those two aspects maybe is open to personal exploration. Jung had two homes. One where he saw his patients, lived with his family, grew renounced and rich. The other was a home which he build himself with stone. It was isolated from civilization where he seldom saw anyone and lived in a very primitive, basic way. Both homes were representing two aspects of his psyche, which had been given form by the nature of the physical home.
So if you look at it this way then you are not leaving behind a home, but entering a home that represents an aspect of yourself, a psychic need.