Written by: Zuali Bungsut
It’s at the airport that I first feel the comforts of home reaching towards me, wafting like the tantalising aroma of coffee from behind the glass doors, beckoning me to return. It’s at the airport where I start hearing familiar intonations of the voice, and start seeing faces like mine, first scattered across the check-in and security lines and later streamlining into one boarding line for flight 6E-5016. Indira Gandhi International Airport, Delhi to Lengpui Airport, Aizawl, Mizoram, direct flight, fire exits are here and here, sit back and enjoy the ride, we’ll be landing in around three hours.
If I couldn’t call Aizawl my home, I don’t know what I’d be left with. Simply by virtue of having lived there for longer than I’ve ever lived anywhere else, the city has a claim over me. And likewise, it belongs to me just as much as I belong to it. I know it like the back of my hand, the grand bung trees across the rickety metal crossover in Bungkawn (named after those very trees); the dips and rises in the roads, the traffic points that drown in tinsel every late December. Six years in the same cramped city that somehow remains the same despite the new buildings popping up on the streets every week, and you’re bound to attach little memories to every place you see.
But this home has never been about the physical space. For the longest time, I thought in order to love a place, I needed to love the way it looked. In a social-media-fueled society, the need for “Instagrammable” pictures that fit into perfect picture frames births the need for one’s entire life to be something beautiful and worth capturing. I’ll admit, a part of me still needs to be able to find beauty in my everyday surroundings. In all shameful honesty, ‘pretty’ isn’t the first word I’d use to describe my city. Maybe just a year ago, I would’ve thought this to be its fatal flaw.
Compassionate. Warm. Embracing. These are the words that come to mind now. Not glamorous, or beautiful. Humble. Safe.
To me, home is the feeling of being taken care of. When I am homesick, it isn’t my bedroom that I miss, but the knowledge that wherever I go, someone will be willing to help me in times of need simply out of goodwill and a sense of kinship. No amount of nightclubs or quaint cafes can overshadow the lack of this sense of security.
Whenever I go to Delhi, it serves as a cruel reminder of how painful the apathy of a big city and its inhabitants can be. Just like how skin goes numb when rubbed against ice, this city’s numbness stings with its sheer lack of feeling. The general indifference of the people in any metropolis, in this case, is combined with the shame and frustration of being marked as different, of belonging to a racial minority with my Mongoloid features visibly reflecting the same.
The contrast between the two capital cities I inhabit is stark and made all too obvious whenever I travel between the two. The last time I left Aizawl was also the first time I ever travelled alone. At the airport, I met a Master’s student studying in Delhi, who had also never travelled alone. Somewhere between waiting in line to board our plane and walking towards it, we had struck up a deal to travel together for as long as we could. Once we had parted ways, now having each other’s numbers on our phones, I struggled alone to lug my 21kg suitcase down a flight of stairs in the metro, weary and exhausted from travelling for 9 hours and fending off uncomfortable stares and questions from strangers sitting next to me. As I heaved my suitcase off the ground and pushed through the opposing stream of office-goers, I grumbled to myself that if I were at home, some kind stranger would have already offered to help me with my suitcase instead of giving me blank and icy looks.
Having come from a community that is rife with warmth and compassion, it seems only natural that I would become a product of my environment, a person who emanates the same selflessness and warmth that she’s been nurtured with. It’s here that I begin to feel like a hypocrite: when I speak about the parts of home that I love, only able to brag about these wonderful qualities while being unable to embody them myself. Recently, a friend of mine and I talked about how the city made us so untrusting of people and their intentions, all too eager to assume the worst of others. Hailing from the Northeast, she’s also had her fair share of racial discrimination that we’ve turned into over-meal chitchat (“A little kid yelled ‘chinky!’ at me the other day”, “I hate getting stared at in public!”) Undoubtedly, neither I nor the two cities I travel between are so black and white, not purely good or evil. I believe at some point, I had the capacity to smile at strangers, extend a hand to one who needed it, or make small talk with store owners. When I am at home, I still do. For now, however, being adrift in the sea of Delhi inhabitants constantly feels like a scramble to shield myself from potential harm.
At the end of the day, it’s almost deceptively simple, what it is about my home that I love – the mere fact that I feel as if I can be a kinder person there. It is the knowledge that I can afford to be kind, that this kindness will never be wasted on anyone, and that it will always return to me in the future in some form unknown at the moment. This is what home means: the place that brings out the best in me by showing me how big of a difference my kindness could make.