You know how it is when you are dripping from head to toe…standing outside your door…waiting for it to open! Ssssss…you want to pee so badly…you don’t realize that you are shifting from one leg to the other…finally ma opens the door…you rush in, put your umbrella aside and dash into the loo. Aaahhhhh what a relief and now you can think! You get out of your wet clothes, stand under the shower and take a quick bath. You are out wrapped in a towel…feeling nice and warm. You go to your cupboard to look for something to wear. On your way you stop and look at the match that’s playing on TV… find it a little boring, take the remote and flip through other channels. Ma asks you not the fiddle with the TV and let Zee play. You shrug and go to change.You casually look out of the window while you put on your shorts..and exclaim to no one in particular 'Its raining like mad'. Wearing your dry, clean clothes you come and sit out on the sofa…there is a text message waiting on your mobile…you pick it up to read and put the Bombay Times thats lying on the floor back in its place, making a mental note Katrina looks great, must read it later. You realize you are thirsty and hungry…you ask ma what’s for dinner! Not satisfied with food you imagine yourself eating a nice hot vada pav, the one that you get at the station!
Everyday life? Is this how it looks? Small small things that we take for granted, like picking up the remote and changing the channels, keeping the times in the usual place where newspapers are kept, sitting with a thud on the sofa with the mobile in your hand. Ordinary everyday things that we don’t think about even while we are doing the act.
Now picture this. You are standing inside your house at the door…watching dirty slimy water gush into your house…by the time you realize what’s happening you are already in ankle deep water. You and your family members are running around the house looking for all the things that are essential and important that you need to pick up and flee…flee from your ‘own’ home! You gather things, there is a mad rush to pack and save as many things as possible, clothes, shoes, documents, something to eat, your laptop… and you leave the Bombay times that’s lying on the floor just as it is…that’s not important. The TV remote is still lying on the sofa… the place where you were sitting with your legs pulled up in a cross.. your hand extended towards the TV and the elbow resting on the side bar of the sofa. You’ve taken whatever you think is absolutely important and you shut the door to your house and run to the first floor before you get drenched in the dirty slimy water. All the things that I took for granted just an hour back are all gone. I am sitting in an unknown place, between unknown people… a place where I can’t pull up my legs in a cross and sit with my elbow on the side bar of the sofa, a place that has a foreign smell to it, it doesn’t smell like home. It gives me the feeling like I am in a new, unknown place… and I think of ‘home’!!
I was in Malaysia for a month and a half. Had a great time there but I yearned for home, for home food, for the smell of home.. for the people at home. But I knew what it was really to come ‘Home’ only when I entered my house after a month and a half and I felt the security that only Home can give you. Its not the security of having a roof over your head, not one of having the people you love around you… its different…its just Home! I have never been able to explain that emotion and I can’t even now. I came back in the end of June, 2005. Hardly a month later 26th July happened and once again I knew what its like not to be Home. I can never forget that night when I stood in the balcony of the first floor of my building and I saw my house slowly slowly being covered entirely with water…! I thought of all those things that I had taken for granted. The small wooden cupboard where I would just dump my things randomly…thinking that I will clean it the next Sunday…Promise Ma. About the balcony in which I stood and talked on phone for hours…playing with the iron bar where we hang clothes. About the comfort of sitting down on the floor and eating because that’s the most comfortable thing to do…so what if my pajama is torn a little bit…nobody is judging me cause I am at Home. Is that what it is? Home is home because nobody is judging you. People have accepted you just the way you are and you can be yourself. You can sit with your legs up on the computer table, you can open a jar of chivda…and drop a lil bit in the kitchen while you are pouring it out on a plate. You can keep the lights of your bathroom on while you stand in front of the mirror and style your hair… looking this way and that…from the left and from the right, you can wear shabby clothes, look ugly…do what you want and you will still be loved!
I am without a home right now. Well not technically… we have managed to make our house a lil livable but we come to the empty flat on the second floor to sleep. I can still be myself here, cause no strangers are around, I can still look ugly cause I know my Ma and dad and bro will still love me… I have some of my things around, not all but some of them…and yet why doesn’t it feel like Home? Why do I long to go ‘home’?
1 comment:
Kash, the concept of home is very vague. Home is not concrete walls, and that place which contains all your belongings. My entire book collection is lying in Lake Tahoe. My clothes are in Kolkata, Mumbai and Kharagpur. My heart is in Portland. But home is ultimately where the heart is. Don't fret after mere materialistic things. Go after your heart. That is where your home is. So now you can perhaps answer your question as to why you long to go "home".....
Post a Comment