H is for home

For a girl who left home after graduate studies and never finally came back for good, what is the definition of home?

Was it that corner room in the hostel where she spent 3 years with her dreams, aspirations, solitude and everything she learnt from the adventures in a new place?

Or was it the room in that shared apartment with 5 new girls in a complete new city with a new found independence? That bare room with almost no furniture but with always crowded with friends and not so friends as well.

Or was it the so called my room in the house I got married into, where I tried my best to make myself feel like home. 

Or was it in the one room apartment where I started my life in a new country with limited resources but unlimited dreams and aspirations?

Or was it in the next apartment we moved into after getting the first job when a place with just more than one room was affordable?

Or was it in the house where I welcomed and raised my 2 kids in this world, made memories of their firsts?

Would you call me weird if I told you none of those felt like home. I was home only when I walked into familiar old house, threw my bag in one corner and laid lazily into her mom's lap, chatted freely with dad, ordered bhai to get me some jalebi. Just that, and nothing else !!

H is for home

Home - In dictionary, it may be just a 4-letter word but it encompasses the warmth and love of whole world.

It is where you feel at ease and comfort and can be yourself.

No matter what part of the world I ever travel to, at the end, home is where I'd want to crawl back to. And this feeling of home is not related to any physical location or a particular house only. I get that feeling when I crash at the end of the day on my side of bed with a book and my mug of hot coffee.

When I go to India, even after being married for 14 years, I do not get that feeling of comfort while I am at my in-laws place. The minute I reach mom's place, the feeling is to kick off my shoes, touch and feel every little thing in the house, then pick up something leftover from the kitchen and lay on mom's bed.

When I was away from home for 3 years for my studies, the first year, my hostel room felt like a prison to me. It felt cold and stranger and so uninviting.

But slowly as I settled into that life, the same room became a second home to me.

I organized it, decorated it (with SRK posters, that’s a different story) and loved coming back to it and felt sad when I was leaving it.

And now staying in this country, even after being here for almost 10 years now, it never gives me a homely feeling.

I still struggle to say that it is my home country and yet it is my home now.