Nomad’s Diary: An IAS Officer Tries To Find The Meaning Of Home

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

Home is where your people are

On the wall across my bed hangs a piece of memory. Perhaps the most intimate thing that I will ever associate with home. It is a portrait of my parents. Taken again in an elsewhere place that qualified as a temporary accommodation. A government allotted one.

The other walls in the house have numerous frames collected from elsewhere places that I have tried to make my home, even for a short time. In one, there is a child with his face blurred with a baby goat sitting outside the blue door. I picked it up from an art school in a village in Chandrapur in Maharashtra where I was then posted. Maybe it reminded me of my occasional trips to my village. Nostalgia is universal but not uniform. It hangs on the walls.

Every time I move to a new place, one of the first questions I am asked is where I am from. I feel I am from everywhere and yet from nowhere. I have not lived long enough in any place to call it home. And enough is a relative thing. After all, what is home? A place full of nostalgia, memories or shared common roots or a place of daydreaming. I was born in Bihar and spent most of my childhood in Saharsa, a small town. Since my parents moved to Saharsa from their village, I lost my claim to a village as my first known home, a definitive notion of your roots, shared lineage and your people.

Rebuild, adjust, and adapt

I grew up surrounded by strangers with whom I had no shared connections or common ancestry. By the time the first notes of friendship were struck, it was time to move on to a new place and new people. Over and over again. after my lower primary education, I moved to a boarding school in Purulia in West Bengal for further studies. This was my first major displacement. The language was new, so were the multitude of faces. I must have spent many nights crying inconsolably, wanting to go back to my parents, to Saharsa, the town which came closest to being home then. I eventually settled down in the quaint little campus of the Sainik School, made friends, learnt to read and write Bangla and relish fish like true Bengalis.

We adapt, adjust and reconfigure ourselves to feel at home. A new language opened new possibilities. I was hoping to shift to a new place only for my college. But I moved to Delhi for my intermediate studies after my 10th board exa-ms. There was nothing that I liked about the city from the confines of the hostel room of a public school. Those two years in the hostel with a bunch of hyper-competitive peers were difficult. I missed my friends in my other boarding school. Everywhere I went, I carried within the memories of the last places I had lived in. There were too many homes within me.

Home truths

Two decades later, I have returned to the city of extreme seasons for a longer stint. I have found old friends, made new ones. Evenings are about yellow lights and long conversations about life and home. I think you find home in people. When I look at everything that adorns the walls of the house, I realise there is nothing from my childhood in the house. Not even those photo frames from my growing up days when we all went to the studio on D.B. Road in Saharsa to get clicked in our best clothes. Back then, studio visits were the only way to freeze the ephemerality of life.

Attachment and detachment

My mother keeps putting up those old pictures once in a while as her profile picture on WhatsApp. Perhaps it is her way of taking us back to the place she calls home, where she spent all her youth with our father bringing us up and building their home together. She still yearns to be back in that house. When they visit me next, I will ask her to bring those framed photos from that studio in my old little town where my parents have a home. I was a little child then, squeezed between my parents and my brother, while a stranger took our photo as a keepsake of that time living in that home.

A part of me still wants to hold on to those memories, but then with every posting, they keep fading. In the last two decades, I have lived in Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi, and Maharashtra. I would visit my hometown often but it never triggered nostalgia like I’d hear my friends so passionately talk about. I have no place to talk about with so much intensity yet. At times I feel sad and uprooted. But more often than not, I feel liberated, knowing well that I am not tied to any one place like my mother is. Meanwhile, I can keep building memories in multiple places I will live in and one day call all of them home, including the place my parents call home. Maybe all those homes can come together in a singular idea of home in the future. With memorabilia and keepsakes. And dreams. A future house. Or a home.

(This appeared in the print edition as "Nomad's Diary")

Ashutosh Salil is an IAS officer. He is co-author of "Being the Change: In the Footsteps of the Mahatma".