Home: An Exercise in Self-Inquiry

Disclaimer: Oh my Bob, this post is a mess…..

Home is a four letter word. Begins with a h, followed by an o, then a m and finally finishing off with a nice e. And if I’m honest, that’s really all that I know about that word for certain. It’s strange really – it’s not a new word for me; I use it all the time. It’s not a complicated word – at least it’s easy to spell. But does it have an easy interpretation? I think not.

In this part of the world, around this time, families get together around dinner tables to carve up inordinately large stuffed turkeys to celebrate Thanksgiving. Of course, the turkey is just a ruse to get the family together under one roof – it is not uncommon for ticket prices for various means of transportation to skyrocket around this time of the year as family member make a mad scramble to reunite over dinner. Everybody’s talking about going home for Thanksgiving.

And it’s pretty much all this talk about home thats caught my fancy. What is home? Is it just a structure with 4 walls and a roof where you’re sheltered from the weather? Is it a place where you go home and find people who are close to you? Is it a place of which you have fond memories? Is it a none of those? All of those? This is pretty much how I’ve managed to turned one of the most basic constants of life for most people into a great unknowable.

I’ve tried to analyse my story thus far – born and brought up in the capital city of India, New Delhi, it’s the place I called home for 18 years. Sure, thanks to my parents, I had roots back in Kazhakuttam, Thiruvanathapuram, down in the southern peninsula, but I can never truly call it home. Yes, it does satisfy some of the parameters I laid out in the previous paragraphs – I do have a place to stay there – though to be more precise, my parents have homes there.  Yes, there are people there who I am close to. Yes, I do have memories of the place – as limited as they might be in number because I only visited Kazhakuttam during summer break. So, is Kazhakuttam home? It’s definitely not my first home.

But can it be one of my homes? That raises an important issue – can a person have more than one home? Sure, maybe it’s not easy to be equally at home at more than one place – but if you can set threshold levels for that homely feeling, maybe you can. Makes me wonder about my Dad really – he’s a really really busy man who spends half of his month in Delhi, half of it in Chennai and whatever’s left in hotel rooms and airport terminals around the country. I’ve seen his home in Chennai. It certainly looks like he enjoys living there. Sure he doesn’t have family there, but well, he’s got work to keep him busy. But he knows he’s got a home in Delhi to come home to. And another one back in Kazhakuttam.

But that’s besides the point – I’m digressing. Getting back to my definition of home – well, for me, home is really just where I’m at. As weird as it may sound, about three months into life at CMU, I haven’t really felt homesick. Unlike several of my friends, there haven’t been teary emotional breakdowns at the mention of that four letter word. Nope. I’m just busy chugging along here.

I had several theories about why I haven’t been subject to this homesickness yet. At first, I assumed I was simply having too good a time to miss home. However, most of that fun vanished shortly after orientation week ended and classes began. (It has been previously theorised that orientation week is just a ruse to cover up for all the pain that the rest of the semester can fling your way.) Then, I started thinking that maybe the workload was keeping me from dwelling too long about Delhi, and family and friends. Maybe that was the reason I never missed any of that – I never had much time to think about them in the first place. But this wasn’t really true. I talked on the phone with my parents a couple of times. Called a couple of friends. Skyped a lot. And no – I didn’t get close to any emotional moment whatsoever. Then I started thinking that perhaps I really was an emotionless robot – something I aptly demonstrated several months ago when me and my friends were going through a pretty emotional period. I kept contemplating which of those two states of mind I was in – too busy or too non-human.

I’ll be honest, before I left Delhi, Delhi was home. Not the city of course. I’m using Delhi to refer to my personal ecosystem within the city. The family. The house. The friends. The school. The room. I can close my eyes and imagine all of it. I really can. I can imagine my mother’s face (even though I haven’t even Skyped with her in months), I can see my best friends, I can see my room. I see it all. And again, the only time I’ve ever done this in the past few months is…well…now… Not once over the past several weeks have I stopped to think about what I’ve left behind. Wow. This post is pretty much an attempt to think out loud – for my sake and for others to understand why I’ve taken some decisions.

And again, nope…no emotion when I just flashed back through my memories. Why is that? Why don’t I miss home? Is it because it isn’t home anymore? I highly doubt that. I’m sure that if I return to Delhi – I can expect things to look more or less the way I left them. And even if things do change, I’m sure I can adapt. The people will be there. The apartment will be there. Delhi is still home.

Then what is it that prevents me from feeling that longing to be home? Is it because I never truly left home? Do modern means of communication technology render physical distance irrelevant? Oh certainly, Mom and Dad can call me whenever they want. My brother’s keeping tabs on everything I do via Facebook. I chat with friends using WhatsApp. Foursquare makes me an easy target for a serial killer. All of that does compensate, but I’m not sure it would compensate entirely for that void.

So, that pretty much leaves just one option: I’ve found another home. Here. In Pittsburgh. At Carnegie Mellon University, to be precise. Not just my dorm room, but this big invisible bubble that covers the places I frequent the most. The places I’ve come to know and love (and in some cases, hate) over the past 3 months. Breafkast from the coffee cart at La Prima Espresso. Chocolate chip pancakes at the Carnegie Cafe. My floor in Boss House. Walking across the cut to my classes. The buggy course. I could go on. And that’s just the places. I’ve found people too – sure, I don’t really have family here – but I do have an amazing bunch of close friends who I’m close with. I spend so much time in the libraries and my dorm room working that I’ve become very familiar with those surroundings. Seems like CMU’s ticked off all of those criteria to qualify as home. Does it bother me that I might not be here 4 years from now? No, it doesn’t.

And that’s because I’ve come to accept the fact that I don’t need to have one home – much like Dad. CMU, in these short three months, has become a home to me, much like Delhi was before this, and I’m sure any other place would’ve been if I hadn’t lived in one city all my life. I already have those treasured memories – and this time I’m logging them – photographs, videos, and when I get the time, a few blog posts – things that will help me preserve the memories that will help remind me why CMU is a home. These logs, in different mediums, will remind me of my time at CMU even when CMU is no longer an immediate home, much in the way that Delhi is no longer my immediate home.

The concept of an immediate home versus a latent home is also important. The immediate home is the here and the now. CMU is my immediate home. Delhi, on the other hand is my latent home. It’s a place I can call home when I go back. But it’s not home right now. It was. And it can be. Just not at this very moment. And that’s a comforting thought – especially when you know that your immediate home might, for some reason, cease to be a home at all. It’s true – events might cause you never to want to return to those places again. Not that anything of that sort’s happened to me – but just the fact that latent homes exist is a source of comfort.

Anyhow, I need to address a certain resentful crowd at this moment – a crowd of family and friends back home who resent my decision to stay over in Pittsburgh for winter break. It’s not because I don’t miss you people. It’s because I know you’re never that far away if it really does come to that – physical presence is overrated. It’s also because this place is like home too. It’s because the work I do here (yes, I’ve got enough of that planned out over winter break) distracts me from the memories that might consume me if I dwell on them too long. Yes, I acknowledge the fact that maybe the lack of emotion is a temporary thing, and that one day I will wake up, be hit by a wave of nostalgia and promptly be knocked out cold. But I’ll cross that bridge later, if I ever come to it at all, that is.

This goes a long way in explaining why watching all my floor mates and friends packing and leaving to visit their families over the week doesn’t affect me. I am aware that even if I really wanted to go back home, I can’t – flying halfway around the globe isn’t really cheap. But then again, I don’t really need to go home. I’m already there.

Even the city’s getting to me – I’ve visited a fair few places in Pittsburgh and have a few more trips planned over the next few days. I want to get to know more about the city. I’ve liked what I’ve seen so far. It isn’t as huge and bustling as New Delhi. Shops wind down by 9:00 PM. This city actually sleeps. And I can live with that. I’ve actually got a folder full of pamphlets I collected during orientation week. They’re about interesting places to visit in and around Pittsburgh. I should be getting a move on that soon – the more I explore the city, the more I’ll be able to identify with it. The more I’ll be able to expand my bubble from just CMU to include other bits of Pittsburgh. The more I’ll be able to create another hometown.

Oh, and the status update bit of the post, just in case there’s anybody still reading through that incoherent mess up there: classes are going well, will be heading over to a friend’s place for Thanksgiving dinner, need winter boots of some sort, need more sleep, have a morning exercise routine back in place, working on some interesting video projects, buggy rolls have ended for this semester, food could be better around this place. But, that said, still alive.