About Home

I visited my parents house after the weekend. I was there to attend a society party. It had been a long time since I last visited. Shifting to my own house, with kids growing up and an ecosystem being built around where I lived, made the visits rarer and rarer. 

As I lay down to retire for the night, I noticed a sudden hollowness, a silence and a melancholy. It felt that the walls were speaking to me, asking me about the cackle that filled the rooms once. The sounds, smells and the people that once populated these environs. The people left one by one. And with them went the cackle, the laughter, the fights, the smell of the food being cooked, the decorations during the festivals and the constant change that accompanies a living home.

What remained were rooms that were frozen in time. The bed was the same, the pillows were the same, and so were the walls, but they felt distant. It felt like meeting a friend after many years. There were the polite smiles, the hints of familiarity, the effort on both sides to find common ground, but it ended with the creeping realisation that both are at different points in their journeys. 

There were memories. The place where my daughter took her first steps. The mark at the entrance when my wife walked in. The hollow on the wall representing the flat TV we had bought. The side of the bed where my grandfather had collapsed. The cabinet was built because the family was getting bigger. The slab where I used to read books when I used to come back for holidays, and the passage where I used to run, taking it all in before going off to a different city for work or study!

Probably that's what it's like about homes. People make them what they are. A lived house is a home; otherwise, it is just walls. A home is where you make memories, have snapshot of time going by, where you are vulnerable and most importantly where you feel safe - a place where you can be yourself. 

It felt like something had changed that night. I had grown up, and it felt like an inflexion point in my life. There was another place that I called home now. The house I was in was the house of my parents, where I had grown up, but it was distant. I had trouble sleeping at first. But then like remembering the same memory when meeting old friends, I found my preferred sleeping position on the bed I once called my bed and the pillow I claimed as my pillow. It felt like a warm embrace and I slept soundly. Thinking about the good times gone by.