Khadak

It was so beautiful, that it was boring.

Four weeks, three countries, two blasts and one lost home..

Stuttgart
September 9, 2007

As the water bottle rolled around in my hands today, wearing a label I cannot read.. I realized, for the first time in a few years, that I don't live home anymore. (And probably won't for three more years).

This written, after being home last week.

There are ghosts in our heads sometimes. Thoughts you know exist, but don!t want to call upon. Thoughts like, home.

To be honest, I do not realize home anymore. It has become a difficult word for me to define now.

Rather more difficult, is to look beyond the associated sentimentality. Home is, in most ways a collection of nostalgia, a remembrance of past.. when things were pure and you were innocent. And going home is really an affirmation that some part of it still lives in you. Or may be, just lives on.

For more than twenty years, I called Hyderabad my home, notwithstanding my parents' residence (which changes every three to four years). I still do, for academic purposes, but I probably don't mean it anymore. The cheerful nostalgia that lived in my head now stands replaced by a crowded, unforgiving and violent place. With time.. man's perception about most things probably do not swim out of the same waters of reason. Emotions are replaced with conservatism, practicality, security and bull-fuckin-shit.

Romanticizing home is not difficult. Being honest about it, is.

This is not (entirely) about the blasts in the city, I was elsewhere at that time. I returned the next day, to find no apparent effect of the occurrences. Three nights later, at a popular night joint where rather profiled people swayed around in a drunken frenzy, "this is our world, of shrugging shoulders and glossy eyelashes. It is shitty, but it is how it is.." I was told. I did n't need to be. I m part of this shit. This of course, could be true across the borders (and continents). This could be any place in this world. Ankara, Madrid.. would all have been the same a week later. Nothing affects us anymore; vermilion is a widely accepted colour on our floors now. I just donno if you could let it be from one of yours.

For a generation which migrates in their early twenties, returning home is but a $1400 ("round")trip which promises a month long buffet for your Indian palate, a cozy bed joisted with memories and a consistent tugging of the heartstrings by the loved ones. An emotional ride, which seems so appropriate to be on. Even dutiful, may be.

There was this private joke, whether we could hear the Swades soundtrack in our heads when we land. I could not, when I did. I expected I would (considering the drama I love to dip my little life in), but sadly, no. It was an understood approval of the senses, more than anything. The body more or less knows its way around. The mind is pre-occupied with the little beauracratic duties that you are faced with and the heart pounds just a tad faster. It is the same formulation for the last two, irrespective of the airport you land into, be it Frankfurt, Heathrow or Begumpet.

Fuckin' NRI's!!

These are no suggestions that we could demote our favorite native country from the celebrated position of being called home. In some opinion of mine, I don't think she gives a damn. But I think we should.

We scramble into places where we are treated as savory guests (your home being no different at this stage), with the great temptation to extend our invitations. No one house is better than the other, of course. You do realize this event-ually.

Between sorting out in your head, where your home is (and the heart of course..) and looking at the "options" you are presented with, you are more often than not, lost. When you step out of that native country of yours, unadmittingly, you lose your home. Not to the fancies of the remainder of the world, not to the money or success that you are promised elsewhere, but to the loss of your naivety, credulity even. You become that proverbial frog that jumped out of the well, and into a frying pan.

The fact is that, it is just a horrible world we live in today. We live in a place where we don't want to belong anywhere. Shameful sentiments seem to ensue any relation. We don't want to embrace nationalities, religions.. or any semblance of a community.

We don't want homes anymore. May be just a place to live would do.


P.S. This was written about seven months back. Found on an old .txt file, felt right to be put on print on a day when (hopefully) no one is getting blasted out of their skins in their backyards.

I think it was written in a fit of frustration. Apparently.

"Life is a series of rooms. And who we get stuck in those rooms with, adds up to what our lives are."

(House, Season 3, Episode 12.)

Hopelessly romanticized. Could be unearthingly true.

People who write such lines should be lined up and shot.