In search of home

Living a hyphenated identity and charting a life path off the beaten track can have you questioning your idea of home. So where do we really belong?

Home is fleeting. Or has been. Home is confusing. Sometimes, it is a place. For the longest time, it was a place. Until I left the place, and realised that home was people. But some of those people left my life too. What became of home then?

Growing up, I used to be a tad disappointed that my family didn’t have a large ancestral home in a native village to call our own. An old family homestead that is a privilege of many feels like such a permanent, rooted place to call one’s own. A piece of earth you can belong to and stake a claim to along with others of your clan.

For Aotearoa New Zealand’s indigenous Māori people, tūrangawaewae (pronounced tū-ran-gah-wai-wai) is a powerful concept that translates to literally ‘a standing place’. A place where one feels most empowered and strongly connected. Your foundation, your place in the world, your home.

I am not sure if I identify with an unequivocal physical home in that sense anymore. I was born and raised in Mumbai, and spent almost 30 years of my life in the city. However, for the better part of the last 10 years, I have been living in Wellington, New Zealand.

Is home either or both these places then?

My family, on both parents’ sides, has been native to Mumbai for at least four generations. The only native village that I seem to have fraying ties to is my maternal grandmother’s childhood home in Murud-Janjira, a once sleepy village on the Konkan coast by the Arabian Sea that smells of drying coconut fronds and a salty sea breeze.

Murud felt like a home we had long left behind as generations of the family moved to Mumbai for ‘better’ lives, whatever better looked like. And yet, it was a ‘home’ that we sometimes returned to with the extended family for New Year’s celebrations and such.

The village of Murud Janjira, India where my grandmother was born and (right) my grandmother's childhood home

The old house that my grandmother was born in still stands, with its Mangalore tiled roof and sturdy sal wood beams and iron bar windows. It is one of the homes that I certainly feel like I come from. But where is the home I inhabit in the now? Is it a place, a person or something else entirely?

Home is all of this and none of this.

Home is the security blanket that I am assured of whenever I cook my mother’s fish curry or my former mother-in-law’s vengaya (onion) sambar and coconut chutney. Home is the YouTube playlist that I keep returning to.

On some days, home comes to me as the fragrance of a jasmine incense and the soft, round flame of a small, ghee lamp that I light in the evenings, as a way of recreating my childhood home that smelled much the same, as my mother carried out this daily ritual. This also feels like home because it takes me back to the many homes from my childhood with aunts and grandmothers adorning their hair with jasmine gajras on festive occasions.

But on other days, home is also the familiar whiff of smoke wisping up the fireplace from a cottage that I walk by on a cold, Wellington evening. Familiar being the operative word.

So home is a sense of the familiar, whether in Wellington or Mumbai.

They say you can’t beat Wellington on a good day

And then on still other days, home comes to me as people - dearest friends and family who I make time to spend time with, even as we are far away from each other.

When I was growing up, the idea of home was set firmly in a time and place with a fixed set of people. Home was where you lived with family, related by blood typically, or a family that you married into. Home was the indescribable sense of belonging that came from blending people and places you loved with all your heart.

Now, as I have moved away from both, the homes I knew and the idea of ‘home’ that I was raised with, home has become something I carry within me.

Over the course of my life, I have lived in 12 physical homes. I carry all of those homes inside me in some way or the other through the memories I create and recreate.

Over the last few years, living alone, and more importantly, learning to live alone and enjoying my solitude, has taught me another important lesson.

That home, first and foremost, is where I am. That I come home to me before I go looking for a haven in another person or place.

May we all find the peace awaiting us in that home within.