I wanna go home, but where is it?
“We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes.” — Madeleine L’Engle
Merriam Webster dictionary describes home as a place of residence, I beg to differ with the definition above. In todays day and age, some of us have had to migrate to bigger cities for education, livelihood and opportunities, the place of residence once called home, becomes a distant almost-painful memory.
Yet, we yearn for this place called ‘home’. Sometimes we look for a home within a concrete structure, other times in people. Which is better or worse, I ask?
Or is it about the smell of coffee first thing in the morning, some exsistential ones ask.
If we were to look at home as an emotion, for some fortunate ones its peace, for most of us its turbulence and for some, abuse. In the wake of Covid-19, as we practice social distancing and are having to quarantine at home, reported cases of domestic abuse have seen a sharp rise, the unreported ones endure pain, day and night. And mind you, emotional abuse is as bad as physical perhaps even worse, considereing all the taboo around mental health.
What really happened to the idea of home being a sanctimonious place, a place of comfort, security and love. On a not so popular belief, family as an institution, is one of the most abusive institutions, yet we are made to believe otherwise.
Some of us, like myself, crave for home everyday, but where is home? Is it the place we were born, grew up, reside at or pay the EMI of? Yeah wanderlusting is great, but what do you do when you are ‘homesick’, when you long for comfort, where do you really go?
I was once denied residence in Mumbai for being a ‘migrant’. For the first ever, someone had referred to me as a ‘migrant’, in my very own country. It struck like lightening and my middle-class-hard-working-entitled-ass was set on fire. Why because, our house help is a migrant, our uber driver is a migrant, while us educated tax paying folks constructively add to the workforce?
Today thousands of migrant workers across India walk miles just to go back home, to a place that desperately evokes a feeling of familiarity. While the ‘migrant’ workers are being denied the luxury of going back home, I sit in a cozy corner in my ‘home’ waiting for this feeling to go away.
