Edited By: Kavya Gupta
“Oh, home, let me come home
Home is wherever I’m with you”
All my life, I’ve lived in the same city, in the same neighbourhood, in the same apartment. As a 6-year-old in grade school, coming back on the school bus and passing by the police station across my house was home. The cobbler who had been there since long before I was born, the bread vendor who never had our favourite bread, that one security guard who was always fast asleep during his 3 p.m. shift. I passed by these people every day when I was growing up — sometimes, I even got upset with the bread vendor for not having brown bread — but I never realised how seeing them came to feel like home. It’s funny to look back and realise that home was not a building, an apartment, or a neighbourhood. Home was the broken light in the lobby that I once kicked a football on, and the loose cobblestone I used to trip over for the last 19 years.
Coming to university did not initially feel like I was leaving home behind, but perhaps that’s only because of the freedom and constant chaos that accompanies being a fresher in the first month. An entire semester went by, and I learnt how to turn some parts of campus into home. Curling up in a corner of the library café to watch Gossip Girl on my laptop, laying on the grass of the mess lawns and looking up at the sky became weekly rituals. Home turned into the group of girls I would laugh with every night before sleeping and do my laundry with at 3 am. But nothing could ever replace the feeling of coming home after school, sitting down next to mumma and whining about my math teacher.
It was only when I went back ‘home’ for the first time after leaving for campus that it truly struck me. Home wasn’t home anymore; Bombay wasn’t Bombay anymore. The cobblestone in my building was fixed, and the cobbler shifted to a different location. The room I spent my entire life with no longer felt like ‘mine’; it now stored extra chairs, stools and bags of old clothes. My favourite street to walk on in Bandra had been under construction for the last 6 months. Nothing feels the same anymore. My city, my home doesn’t feel like home any more.
The friends I grew up with and went to school with no longer felt like mine, and how could they? I thought the relationship I had with them was the closest you could ever get to someone, but that was before I made college friends who’ve watched me clean my ears and smelled my morning breath. When those friends become home, the ones at home feel… different; how do I tell them every deranged thought running through my head? How do I describe every random, irrelevant detail of my life to them?
But on the other hand, I don’t get to reminisce about old times with these college friends. With hometowns from around the country, I can’t expect them to know my favourite milkshake joint that’s across the road or relate when I complain about Bombay traffic. My college friends might be the ones I party with every Thursday night, but they weren’t there the night I had my first drink. I don’t get to talk to them about my first ever crush, because they weren’t there 8 years ago the first time I hugged him — or any boy for that matter — and felt butterflies in my stomach. This campus, filled with people I don’t and might never know, will never feel the same to me as the ones from school. After all, I grew up in school where I had seen the boys who flirted with me go through puberty and shave for the first time; I grew up walking corridors that felt like mine, where I knew the name of each person who passed by me.
Home, let me come home… But how do I go home when I don’t know where home is? There are days when I feel torn between the old and the new, between the nostalgia of the past and the excitement of the future. I wrote this to try to make sense of my feelings, but maybe there is no reconciling the past and the future. I hope to write something similar one day where the coexistence of these two worlds is seamless, but for now, all I want is to go home.