Home is a feeling, not a place

I long for the many simple things that I took for granted when I lived in India and am looking forward to introducing our child to the flavours and smells that signify home

I’ve already begun counting the days until I will be reunited with my family. Just before I began writing this, my partner told me that non-stop flights from Milan to Delhi have just been re-introduced. For a moment I considered changing our itinerary. We had configured a plan that involved flying from Milan to Dubai. This would allow us to break up the journey, our first with kid in tow, and offer us the privilege of staying a few days with my brothers and their families and visit the ongoing Sharjah Art Biennial. We’d then head to New Delhi and finally to Goa. I decided against tweaking our plans, though, because I am, by now, already excited about Dubai. It is also home, in some ways, since my brothers have been stationed there for more than two decades and I’ve travelled there so frequently, it feels familiar.

I cannot believe it will be almost three years since I left, and that I’ve had to contend with such a prolonged absence from my loved ones because of the pandemic and other systemic bureaucracies. My homesickness intensifies every day. At this point I can look at a banana that is taking four days to ripen and feel triggered by how alienated I feel from the fruits and vegetables that were so much a part of my daily diet. The bananas here are imported from South America, arrive raw and are sold almost raw; you have to wait until they yellow before you can actually unpeel them. I often buy them from the section of the supermarket reserved for items that are discounted because they are approaching their shelf-life expiry. This is the only way to be able to eat them on the same day. The cashier sometimes offers an even further discount because they are embarrassed by the ripeness. I tell them that where I come from, in Goa, there are so many different kinds and sizes of bananas and they vary in sweetness. Mangoes also elicit strong emotions. What is available here is also imported from South America and they taste like sweet water, bereft of any other nuance. On account of these emotional intensities, I keep returning to the concept of ‘the citizen of the country of longing’, a shadowy figure theorised in Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City. Mehta spoke about being in one place while dreaming of the one left behind, thus continually inhabiting an in-between island between two spatial entities.

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Spring has burst forth, studding the landscape with different hues, a spectrum of yellow, blue, white, and red. Despite the spectacular profusion of magnolia, I fantasise about being in the lulling shade of coconut trees and watching their branches sway after a boozy lunch and a dip in the sea. I long for many such simple things that I took for granted when I lived in India. I ache for kadipatta, the scent of its sacrifice when it splatters in oil. I dream about open-air markets and food that doesn’t tremble at the thought of being seasoned with spice. At night I put myself to sleep by reciting a litany of delights such as these that I had to leave behind without having the chance to acknowledge that the last time I had them would be the last time… like parting with a lover without a final kiss, because you didn’t know you wouldn’t see each other again in forever.

I sound melodramatic, I know, and I am aware of how my longings and desires are almost cliché. But that doesn’t make them less real. Perhaps this time I’m also elated about introducing our child to all the flavours and smells that signify home to me, in an act of passing them on to him, enlisting his citizenship in my country of longing.

This evening I made egg drop curry, with fresh farm eggs that a farmer gifted my father-in-law. It was a request from my partner. It’d been too long since I last made it, he said. It turned out fabulous. I thought about how very Goan the dish is, and how, as I first learned to make it as a child, I always marvelled at how the egg seemed to be swallowed by the curry. Then, gradually, as the heat penetrated its liquid core, it would begin to poach and reveal itself, the yellow forming into a soft globe while the surrounding white absorbed the curry’s flavour. I assumed this was how everyone made egg curry, until I went to JNU and discovered the not-so-exciting North Indian version which uses hard-boiled eggs. I think this is what I miss most, being in a place where my culinary longings make sense. This is why I’m looking forward to being in Goa. I cannot get over how many levels there are to homesickness and how home is not a place but a feeling that is so bound to being in community with others who share your background or can grasp your origins. I’m looking forward to the temporary luxury of not being a foreigner.

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D’Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.

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