Where are you from?

Apr 15, 2021

I have a very loose concept of ‘home’ - scattered as my youth and childhood have been, all across the country. Home is where the weary soul feels at rest. But which one, among the multiple places I’ve inhabited, truly belongs to me? Whose haunts, nooks, and crannies still call to you, where you can feel time stop, and find yourself among old familiar faces again. As if you’d never left.

Where are you from? I find this very hard to answer.

“Truth is, I am from nowhere and everywhere at once.”

Or rather, I have been different persons in different places and now, my sense of self is scattered amongst all these places, and merely recounting the places I’ve lived in, does no justice to the question.

I’ve been the truant child in Assam, where I spent the first five glorious years of my life - tying strings to dragonflies’ tails (don’t know why I did that), stealing fruits off of neighbors’ trees, and playing around in my backyard all day. Thirteen idyllic and sheltered years were spent in Mumbai, the longest I’ve spent in any place. But I felt constrained here, my movements monitored and critiqued. By the end of it, I was longing to move away from home, ready to leave everything I’d known and loved, for somewhere I could really be free and independent.

I suppose I really blossomed in college, as every sheltered young person does, coming in contact with people from every corner of the country. It didn’t matter that college was in Trichy, an extremely conservative town in South India. I really did start to think this was home.

Only, college gets over in four years and then you don’t know where you belong anymore. Again.

Since then I’ve been floating around from city to city, without really getting attached.

Of constant adventure and endless summers

There is still a place in my mind, however, that calls back those long golden summers of my childhood in my mind. Somewhere I spent all my time playing, watching TV, and just generally soaking in the love and affection around me.

“One of the things I was looking for in this trip was the perfect town. I’ve always felt certain that somewhere out there in America it must exist. A place inexplicably picturesque, where houses with porch swings and picket fences peeked out on a blue sweep of bay full of sail-boats and skimming launches. It was a places of constant adventure and summers without end."
- Bill Bryson, in The Lost Continent, Travels in Small-town America

The place of ‘constant adventure and summers without end' for me, was my grandparents’ home in Alipur Duar, a small town in West Bengal. I still remember the narrow lane studded with small stones, grass growing on both edges, and the large bungalows with their gardens - with the biggest roses, marigolds, and dahlias I’ve ever seen. The sun, not too hot, not too cold. The air, redolent with the smell of flowers and the large white house in the middle of the lane, where grandma and grandpa would wait expectantly, for us.

Grandma and Grandpa (2010)

Grandpa in front of the house (2010) - notice the greenery all around

Afternoons were spent playing outside the house

Lunch at Aliporeduar

I recently had a chance to visit this place. A brief stop, on the way to a cousin’s wedding. The thought of revisiting those old childhood haunts, especially after so long, set off a weird ache of longing and anticipation within me. It was like making a pilgrimage or visiting the set of your favorite movie only - the person at the center of interest is you. You’re investigating your own origin story.

Alas, time had changed my grandparents’ house beyond recognition.

My sister and I walked around in disbelief, trying to reconcile what we saw to the images that were once so dear to us. The houses (already so large) had expanded, adding another floor or two. The trees that we’d played under had been cut, and so had the fresh green patches of grass along the road with the small flowers that had attracted the butterflies and honeybees. There was too much construction around.

The place still looked familiar, but it was like viewing it through a broken camera - all the color had leached out of the photo, leaving only the greys. The bungalows still had their gardens but they seemed shrunk and tired and dusty, with all the cement that had been dumped around them. My own grandfather’s garden had shrunk to a mere afterthought. Grandpa had loved gardening. He’d spent endless hours potting around in the garden, in the hot afternoon sun, his marigolds standing tall and erect all around him. All of my sister’s favourite plants (she’d loved flowering plants) were gone, even the marigolds.

Every marker of my childhood and my grandparents had vanished or irrevocably altered.

My anxiety rose. But what about the pond?

The pond

The pond at the end of the lane was a mythical place for us kids. Ghosts were said to congregate there at night. It was shrouded from immediate view, by a ring of trees - amlas, lemon trees, oranges and tall ferns. Goats would graze around it peacefully.

Yes, the pond was still there, as was the ring of trees around it. But the houses had inched in closer and had already eaten up the empty grounds surrounding the pond. Like the scene of some epic ongoing standoff.

At night as we returned from a wedding reception, we were greeted by the same pitch blackness - still no streetlights in this area even after a decade. This time though, no fireflies hovered in the air, twinkling merrily, settling in your hair and dress.

All was silent and calm.

“You can’t beat the phone company, you can’t make a waiter see you until he’s ready to see you, and you can’t go home again."

- Bill Bryson

If you enjoyed this post and would like to read more of my work - delivered straight to your email, do consider subscribing!

If you would like to tell me what you thought of this post, leave a comment below :