If there is curd rice and potatoes, I am home, just anywhere.

My hostel room had Khushwant Singh’s 8 Rules to Happiness stuck up on the wall, in which he writes, “Rented premises can never give you the snug feeling of a nest which is yours for keeps that a home provides.”

Both me and my roomie- are Gulf brought up Indian Kids and that line made us go, “What’s he talking about?”

It’s probably very recently that expats are allowed to own homes in the Middle East, but wait, we are a whole community of people who live in rented homes, in countries we will never be a citizen/permanent resident of, we still call it home! For most ME Indians, owned House property is in India , which is either vacant/let out or a place where grandparents/relatives stay, but what is used as a dwelling place for most of the year, a “home”, is in ME. It always confuses me, when all your family is in one country but your citizenship and owned home are in another.

Nevertheless, he’s right. Home should be like an axis around which our lives revolve. No matter where we go, when its vacation time, we pack our bags and “go home”. What do you do when your home is just revolving around the world all the time?

I have always wanted a “home” in Chennai. It’s a city that always keeps me coming back to it- from studies, to work, to citizenship, to language, to friends, to family- its’ the perfect place for me. I have incessantly nagged my family to consider it. (Sighs).

We were the last of our family to move to Muscat. I remember the flight to Muscat for the first time, (I was about 4-5 years old then), when the glass doors opened, our entire clan was everywhere I looked. Beaming at us with our trademark Dracula teeth smile. It was quite intimidating, the whole lot of them. Everyone was picking me up and I was passed around like in a “passing the parcel” game without music. Since our initial days in my Thatha (granddad)’s house in Rusayl, then our first flat in Al Khuwair to our current house, we have moved about 7 times (if I remember correctly).

Our extended family is now scattered around the globe, but we are still in Muscat, a country that is our home for so long, yet we can’t call it home ’cause we’re not citizens and we never know for how long we’ll be here, yet when I say I am going home, I mean I am going to be with my family in Muscat. It’s funny yet disorienting that the axis of my life is revolving all the time.

It’s that disoriented part of my brain that nods at Khushwant Singh’s line. But the better part of my brain says, Home is what we make of it.

From birth (in Tuticorin) to Bangalore, Ahmadabad, Chennai, Muscat, I have “lived” in so many homes.

The dungeon like hostel room where the best times of life have been lived , how can it not be home?

Then there are homes away from home, (those long summer vacations in villages/towns somewhere in the wilderness in the family’s native district/ relatives’ places).

Then there are homes, I haven’t lived in but I relate to, simply because it has something to do with my ancestry.

And then there are places I’ve fantasized living in, from Delhi, Mumbai, Goa, Japan, Manchester, Australia, Manhattan … ( and, Bacteria, if you’re reading) Santa Monica, LA.

Home is just everywhere, isn’t it?

Thus,this is just me, globetrotting….
And at home, everywhere….

Tagged: arab, Chennai, home, hostel room, indian kids, initial days., khushwant singh, life, middle east indians, nri, Writing

Posted in: Katha