In the past few days, many intersecting ideas have travelled through my neural highways. A lot of traffic, congestion and so much ‘under construction’. What the structure that will be built ultimately remains to be seen. A solvent, semi-formed, jumbled maze might be a possible outcome as well. The predominant question leading to this traffic jam: “Where and what is home?”
Is it one particular location? Is it a building with some walls and a roof? Is it a place where my material belongings are housed? Or is my home a feeling, a sense of appreciation, acceptance and security? Is home really where the heart is? Can a home be in multiple places? Can it be where my childhood played, where I now live, and the happy place in my mind, all at once?
Is my home a sense of space to grow into? Is it a place for the weary soul to rejuvenate? Does the understanding of ‘home’ start with awareness in the mother’s womb to slowly expand outwards concentrically to encompass the bigger world?
What does a home look like? Is it an apartment, a house, a town, a country, or something bigger?
What does a home have? An aroma-filled kitchen, a cosy bed, a tight hug, and flurries of laughter? Is home the sigh of relief when driving back from work? Or while returning from an outstation trip, as one starts seeing the signs on the road leading to your hometown?
When I start digging deeper for answers, the countless homes in all shapes and forms flash past my mind’s eye — my own that I have lived in, and somebody else’s that I’ve come across in this life so far.
The first home I really opened my eyes in, was the place I arrived in this world screaming and kicking! It was the only bedroom in my grandma’s tiny, cosy three-room home. I decided to jump out in this world into my maternal grandma’s hesitant, untrained arms, leaving no time for my father to arrive with a taxi cab or my mother to reach the hospital. And, I’ve been in rush ever since, to drive it ‘home’!
That bright spot seen from the space, a tiny speck on the face of mother Earth, was my first encounter with the ‘idea’ called home.
A middle class dwelling in the suburbs of Mumbai, three small rooms in a two-storey stretched-out building known as a ‘chawl’. Very modest single or double room households (and three rooms if you were slightly luckier or moneyed than others) all lined up like the compartments of a train, opening on to a common corridor with wooden slat railing, making it one long ‘balcony’. Two such long trains stacked one on top of the other to form the two storeys of this chawl.
A family of six or seven people living in that tiny space, none with toilets inside their homes. A row of four or five communal lavatories in a small structure separate from the residential wing for common use of all the households combined was the only choice of amenities. And inside the home, just a tiny bathroom with a tap and a bucket for an economical shower.
The long and narrow tiled courtyard of the ‘chawl’ filled with noisy children playing tag or cricket or marbles. Limited resources, not very many television sets, telephones and certainly no computers, and unlimited entertainment. No social media but camaraderie and connection unbounded.
Leaning in, dangerously too far forward over the ledge, staring deep into the dark well that stood at the end of the courtyard. Looking for past mysteries written on the mossy stonewall, or a swimming turtle or seeing one’s reflection ripple away after tossing in a pebble was in a way the YouTube and Facebook of those times. And knowing that my mother had learned to swim in this well, with an airtight tin container tied on her back for a float made it cooler still.
Many, many memories were made in that cosy space called grandma’s home! The family gatherings and special meals on holidays ... the aroma of Indian spices and the sweet fragrance of her semolina cake laced with ample doses of vanilla, baked on an open stovetop flame... on a kerosene stove before the gas ones came along...
Growing up, my family home looked a little different from grandma’s home. It was in a new five-storey, modern building, in a roomy apartment with my own space and loads of children of my age to play with, in many spacious courtyards and huge rooftop terraces within the complex of four such buildings that formed a cooperative society.
As I sit here and reminisce about the early memories in these homes that are so dear to me, I look around me and my American home. And I realise that three or more of those homes from my childhood could fit into this space we live in. This American dream, the privilege that this is, sometimes is taken for granted. But one thing is for sure: even if at times I get nonchalant or cavalier about my circumstances today, I still never forget where I’ve come from. Or, what I have seen and felt in my heart. All of that holds me in good stead in the western world we live in today.
Where I come from, I know what abject poverty looks like. I also know what humanity and the resilience of spirit looks like. I will never say I have lived or experienced lack or poverty, but I have surely seen it from very close quarters, a lot of it. From the very tiny slum dwellings with weak walls and thatched roofs that you see a lot of while growing up in the metropolis of Mumbai; we had one, just outside of the residential complex I grew up in.
The low-income, one or two-room mill worker’s housing we walked into, as we went door to door as college students to conduct a health survey, to create awareness and encourage them to seek treatment in the affordable, municipality-run hospitals...
Witnessing for six years, people with absolutely nothing (no hyperbole, none whatsoever) who flocked to one of Asia’s largest municipal hospitals hoping to heal and survive against all odds...
I never forget the very valuable lessons I have built within me because of all of these experiences.
The formative years in India have lent many like me an inner compass, a vision and value for all that we see around us now. With it also comes the sad realisation of how much is taken for granted in this country. All that would be considered an absolute luxury by someone half a world away is squandered away in ungratefulness.
Going about my life and work, this world view and the unique privilege an immigrant from a developing nation is likely to have, has become more important now than ever before.
I have seen how happiness overflows in a poor home, and I have also seen miserable mansions on the face of this earth.
So when a person gets elected telling people that America has become a ‘third world country’ (although I don’t care much for that term) I have to shake my head in disbelief for everyone who chose to believe him. When we talk about ‘making America great again’, maybe we ought to travel to different places around the globe learning history, civics and human geography along the way, before deciding for ourselves if America is really in such a sorry, dire state.
I do not believe in sitting on our laurels. Being alive is to move ahead with a desire to change, build, innovate and expand. But it also means being realistic about what we do have today and not acting from fictional fears for tomorrow projected out into the world by someone for personal gains.
In India, I have seen drug-riddled, dishevelled homes. I have seen hope-infused neat nests. I have seen contentment in modest abodes and I have seen palaces filled with tirades and screams. I have seen illegal immigrants burrowed into tiny cubbyholes deep in the earth’s crust — and all of these are homes. All of these homes have a soul. All of them have hearths, big or small. And regardless of what we choose to call them, these are cocoons, a mother’s womb, protecting and nurturing the human race and the history of mankind.
America is home to many diverse people from around the world because they sought it out and it chose to welcome them. Almost everyone here who calls this land their home is an ‘outsider’. So the countless, unnecessary episodes of ignorance, prejudice, hate and insensitivity, heard from people of different ethnicities in the last few days, will definitely not ‘make America great again’. When you start pulling threads out of the tight weave of a flag, and if a stitch or two is not placed in time, the fabric gets weaker and eventually rips apart.
Regardless of how diverse we are in this oneness, a feeling of warmth, a sense of belonging, safety and security in one’s home is the right of every citizen of this nation.
Because when all else dissipates, ultimately home truly is only where the heart lives...
swaroopagadgil@me.com
