To all the homes I loved before

For the first time in 35 years, a trip to Delhi did not automatically mean going home.

I got to Delhi airport last week and tapped on my cab app. The first of frequently used destinations that appeared was saved as Home. My throat caught. Who knew booking an Uber could hurt. That address ceased to be my home, since my mother sold it and moved to Bombay last year. For the first time in 35 years, a trip to Delhi did not automatically mean going home.

I stayed with my friend who lives close to my old home. It’s also a home for me—when I left, her mum stuffed my bag with kababs. Yet I felt like I had a ghost limb. Intimate streets, predictable traffic but the sense of an incomplete journey, as if I had just stopped on the way home, which, in my mind stood exactly as before.

Funnily, I never really lived in that house. When my parents moved there, I had already begun to make my life in Bombay. Yet, because it was my parents’ home, subconsciously it seemed like if all else failed, there would always be a place to “return” to, a refuge. When my father passed away, the house stood in for his embrace, for the sight of him squinting at a mirror as he trimmed his moustache in the balcony, stocking the refrigerator with ice cream when my friends visited, planting the bougainvillea. Without the house to mark that time, one must accept that one has travelled down the road of time, without a loved one after all. Returning is not an option. We must be our own refuge.

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I grew up living in many different houses, thanks partly to my father being in the Air Force. Each house had been occupied by some other family before—we walked into another’s once-home and made it our own for the two or three years we lived in it. Each leaving was a wrench undercut by romantic anticipation for the new place that awaited us. Each new place started out feeling thrillingly exotic—new flowers, new flavours, new words, an Enid Blyton adventure in the making!—and ended feeling achingly familiar, a lost beloved, like home.

I often think that this life of many homes formed my personality—at home everywhere and yet, never feeling like I belong anywhere, adventurous, gregarious yet aloof. We lived in each home knowing we must go, but acting as if we’d be there forever—undoing some of what the last family had done to the place, building familiar rituals of library memberships, Sunday lunches, new best friends, standard haircut place (I still only get my hair cut in Delhi). In one house, in Secunderabad, my father painstakingly planted a circular lawn, ringed by a flowerbed of pansies, and built a rockery under the jacaranda tree. I went back to see the house over 20 years later to find the garden wild and quite ignored by the current residents. Then I noticed that some weeds had grown in a perfect circle, tracing the circumference of that old round lawn. So someone must have tended it as their own, long after we left with the attention and love one gives to one’s home. Homes belong to everyone and no one, used to the loving and leaving.

That is why, we may always be a little lonely, but I guess home never is.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com

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