Thinking about home

The things that make us who we are beyond the physical, and the immense gratitude it exists at all

The coffee shop I like to visit in Bangalore

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about home. Not just the bricks and mortar of it, but the food that is both history and memory, songs that stretch back to the first one sung to us by our mothers, the jokes we tell wryly in queues and dinner parties about how we collectively behave as a people, the history of all we are, the generations of family who remember us coming into being, and when they leave the earth, we become the keeper of that for our little ones.

Part of this introspection has been led by the trip I’m undertaking to India, which is where my family are from, and where my sister and I spent some time growing up.

When I was seven, my parents decided to relocate back to India from England, until five years passed by and they decided it wasn’t for them. Despite spending most of my life in England, India will always be one of my homes. It was pressed into me during my most formative years and there is a part of me that is always missing when I am not there, that slots into place the moment I land. It has been six years since I last visited – the longest I have ever been away, and there is something that stirs that is deep and vast.

Alongside the anticipation, there is an anxiety that builds – what if I have changed so much I no longer fit? What if too much has happened in six years? But mostly, there is love and longing.

For the unique signature of things that make India mine. The coconut seller on the corner of the street down from where my parents live during the winter months. My mother’s crab guy who will sell her only the freshest blue crabs so she can make my favourite curry. The way everyone will invite to you to their homes and ask you to stay, which feels like a billowing of love and warmth. The sound of kites overhead, the yodel of the fruit seller as they push their cart past.

But in all of it there is gratitude, for the abundance that is a second home, for the restful knowledge that all of these things will still exist when I go back, that perhaps the architecture may change, and people move on, but mostly it is all there. The great aunt who knew me as a baby, the flame-coloured flowers of the Gulmohar tree in December.

My mother’s fish shop

Other things have prompted me to think about home, namely an incredible article by Nesrine Malik in The Guardian called What does it mean to erase a people – a nation, culture, identity? In Gaza, we are beginning to find out, which haunts me. I have thought about it almost every day.

In it, she writes about the destruction in Gaza, not just of lives lost, but written and oral history, the libraries, the buildings, the generations of families wiped out, the colossal loss of a people where gaps of knowledge will exist, and there will be no one to fill in the blanks, no one to talk to about the playground you loved as a child, or a dish that you could find on the particular corner, of a particular street.

“A memory gap is forming,” she wrote. “Libraries and museums are being levelled, and what is lost in the documents that have burned joins a larger toll of recordkeeping. Meanwhile, the scale of the killings is so large that entire extended families are disappearing. The result is like tearing pages out of a book.”

This erasure, this mining of history and methodical, relentless destruction is not unique to Gaza – we humans have been doing this to each other for hundreds and thousands of years. And when we consider the current state for refugees, the idea that your home has become so unsafe it requires fleeing into the unknown, seems unthinkable to those of us who have never had cause to do so.

It is a thought that renders the mundane into something precious and remarkable. Boarding a flight for a holiday, planning the supermarket shop before heading home, the pinnacle of worries being the survival of your house plants in your absence.

I keep turning these thoughts over in my head. In part, because even in the everyday, at the moment I mostly think about Gaza, and I think about all of those other people in the world for whom home is not safe. I think of those of us who got to make a festive dinner, and those of us who desperately yearn for clean water. When I look up at the sky above my home, and wonder what type of clouds sit held in the blue bowl, I think of how lucky I am, that those puffs trailing above are the contrails of a plane, and not a missile, and how, with a different latitude and longitude, they could easily be the latter.

Luck is probably a better word than gratitude. Gratitude indicates we are using some else’s suffering as a backlight to appreciate what we have in our lives, but it makes me consider things in a different way. Part of my discomfort when I am in India is a mirror image to my discomfort in England. Although my family are from here, I am not considered to be from here. Conversely in England, there are some who will never think of me as British no matter what it says on my passport. This limbo, where you are nothing and yet you know you are something, has taken a long while to reconcile.

I think about what Nesrine calls the ‘connective tissue between you and your country’ and how it is made of more than the physical. It has made me appreciate that belonging is not just in your accent or your skin colour, but the things we know are home to us.

The anxiety I have felt about India dissipates, especially in the first few days of me being here. It isn’t halcyon - there is plenty about it that makes me scream into the void, but it is mine, and it exists. And the import of both of those words, in the time we currently live in, is not lost on me.