When did you last go home?

Home is where Mum waits for you. Home is where Mum waits for you to leave again.

We returned home from the airport at 3am. We were back from our holiday in Goa. Aliza had just turned 1. She woke up as we entered home. Leaped out of my arms. Ran. Pulled out her toys. Touched the walls and rolled on the floor. She was awake for a few hours, in communion with her world, a space she recognised as her own. A toddler was celebrating her homecoming.

I am an un-rooted, homeless sort of vagabond person inside me.

As a parent I look carefully at our children’s natural affinity for home. For the firstborn, home was us. She woke up with us, she slept only when we did. We bathed and nursed her and changed diapers in hotel rooms, railway stations, boat rides, bus stands and roadside dhabas. Aliza, the second child, adopted the physical home as the centre of her universe. The third child has created a home for all of us. She owns her world. I watch her and learn.
I have always had trouble belonging. Fitting in. In retrospect, it doesn’t seem like a bad thing at all. Not belonging anywhere helped me to accept everywhere. Having to adapt taught me to adapt.

Imagine fitting in comfortably in a world full of injustice and war. In a home of suppressed hurts and unexpressed love. News stories of torture, rape and genocide. Dead children. It’s no wonder that we reach for our addictions.

Homes fascinate us. We look behind curtains and study the details of bathrooms. We peep into kitchens and look for stories behind the layers. Homes we have visited stay with us.

Sitting on the kitchen counter at Khanna aunty’s, getting my nails painted. Choosing as many cookies as I wanted from the glass jar. I was 5. She’s dead now. Her life ended tragically.

Growing up and visiting a home where the table was laid with a Corning dinner set and feeling confused. My parents had kept their Corning dinner set on a wall-mounted display all our life. I inherited it from them. We use it every day.

Visiting a friend’s family in their two-room barsati in west Delhi. A beautiful wall with mud art, painted by the mother, a single parent. Crisp baingan slices fried with a thin coat of besan on them. A recipe from the Kanpur home she had left behind. A silent, sulking teenager in the other room.

Homes where everyone seems to be yelling, yet they burst into laughter a lot. Polite homes, where the warmest welcomes come from the domestic staff. Homes where everyone lives in a different home. Sometimes fathers and sons do that. One enters, the other leaves. Monologues, not conversation.

Home is where you go back to remember why you left home in the first place. Home is where Mum waits for you. Home is where Mum waits for you to leave home.

One of my best homes was my first workplace. “My office is my playground,” I had written to my boss once. When I quit 13 years later, there was one clear sentence in my head. “I just want to go home.” I was ready to grow up.

I hate being home. I also insist on being home. There’s something here that I am mending my relationship with. We need this time.

We decorate our homes, we feel proud of them, we take photos when the light is just right. Sometimes we find that we still don’t feel at home. Something isn’t right in the expression in our eyes when we look at the selfie we click. There’s this inexplicable urge to go home, says my friend, trying to put her finger on it.

The weight of our pretences overwhelms us. We hate the masks we cling to. Lies rest heavy on our shoulders.

Home is where you return after you are defeated. It takes defeat to find out what home is for. Home is where you recover. Where you have the permission to be ill. Silent. Messy. To own your resources.

I’m getting there. I’m not in a hurry. The big fat family wants you to belong, the great system out there wants to own you. There’s no need to oblige anyone. You’re not an indispensable cog in the wheel. Protect your talents, use them for free, it isn’t necessary to put everything on the market. To reach where you belong, you must un-belong elsewhere.

I let the physical home wait. So many other things need ironing and fixing and nurturing. And neglecting. There’s children, family, friends and me. Our work.

When your new voice is more powerful than the old nag inside you, you won’t need to put yourself down any more. When you give up on judging yourself, you will find yourself at home.

This essay is an excerpt from my book, My Daughters’ Mum

My Daughters’ Mum