By Tanvi Jain
Edited by: Tara Doraiswamy
“Home is people. Not a place. If you go back there after the people are gone, then all you can see is what is not there any more.”
~Robin Hobb
Come the end of my first year, I have been thinking of home lately.
During my first few days in Ashoka, I was often reminded of home. I couldn’t sleep the first night, each trigger of the motion-sensing light outside woke me up. I just wanted to go back to having dinners with my family, sleeping on my familiar bed and just living within those walls that saw me grow up. Then my parents and brother came to visit me on campus. Their hugs, my conversations with them, and the food that my mom so painstakingly packed made me feel instantly calm. The memories of their visit have been filed into the folder of ‘home’ in my mind.
I was waiting in the lobby for the lift and met a friend of mine who I hadn’t seen in a while. I told him I was going to my best friend’s room and he replied, “Oh, so you’re going home.” That statement was so innocently meant, but I instantly knew he was right. I was going home. I reached her room and realised I could recount every inch, every detail. The jaali-like fairy lights, the shaggy pillows, the forever-cluttered desk, the drawer that never shuts. I hate it when I open her door and the room is empty, but then I meet her instantly coming from the pantry, and everything is alright again.
Places where I meet my friends — the commons, a random meeting room, and even that one table in the library cafe — have so many memories attached to them that they can never not be home. Like the time we raced our chairs in the student commons at midnight, or when we laughed at absurd Bumble profiles in a deliriously sleepy state of mind. The Amul parlour is home when we all have the raspberry duet in our hands, and the mess lawns are home when we lay on the grass to soak up the welcome winter sun. When one of us has a bad day, we call and vent and cry and console. That phone call is also home.
Home is where I am. I’ve learnt to grow comfortable enough in my skin to understand that I am all I need. I am my confidant, my muse, my supporter. Every space I occupy, be it my room or that unofficially designated seat in my Maths for Econ lecture, I can call it home because it feels that way. On days I need clarity of thought, I remain in my room. I light a candle whose fragrance is like ghar ki Diwali, I make poha like my mom makes at home and I put on a show that I’ve seen at least eight times before. It feels familiar and safe, and I feel at peace again.
Home is not home without my people.
I cannot go a day without calling my parents, yet when I go back for the weekend, I end up incessantly texting my friends. I look at the class pictures from my school and get nostalgic, yet when I did go to school, I could not wait for dispersal so that I could meet my brother.
***
My friend was talking about how four months is a long enough time between semesters to forget that we ever led a life in university. That we will come back, having to readjust all over again. I think that the relationships we have cultivated in the past year will make the transitions so smooth that we will forget that we were ever apart. Spaces don’t matter, as long as we have the people who feel like home.