Home is where the feeling of home resides

For most of my past two decades, I’ve had great difficulty in answering the simple question: “Where are you from?” — Should it be the place I was born? or the place I lived longest? the place where my parents were from? Or the place I live now? or the place I feel the greatest attachment and separation from?

I was born and brought up in Coimbatore, in Tamil Nadu, which comes in the southern part of India, while my parents were from Kerala with my mother tongue Malayalam. Tamil Nadu and Kerala are neighboring states, and because I was surrounded by my Tamil neighbours, I ended up speaking more of Tamil with my classmates, and became more strongly accentuated with Tamil, much to the embarassment of my family circles who noticed my slippage from purist Malayalam, to a more varied one with occasional Tamil words thrown in.

My Malayalam ended up having a Tamil accent, and my Tamil ended up having a Malayalam accent.

English, strangely enough, was the only language that escaped this confusion, and it was neutral enough that whenever I spoke in English first, it was difficult to place me “where I was from?”. The neutrality in a way, helped provide me a comfy zone, helping me avoid the situation of having the explain myself and my complicated origins for the nth time.

I was also a by-product of tamil-malayalam bullying by my classmates, so I came up with an escape-mechanism in my eighth/ninth grade by self-accepting English as my mother tongue. No more identity crisis, problem solved. I could think and dream in English, and even the grass in my dreams grow in English, so why not?

English gave me this feeling of belonging, when both Tamil and Malayalam, whereas the languages didn’t. You might also note how I’m denoting the languages as personalities, because they were quite powerful forces that shaped my identity in different ways.

“Where are you from?” was really a linguistic nuisance, while masquerading the actual question of “where do you call home?”.

If I said I was from Kerala, some of them would probe further, “No, no, where are you really from?”. “Kerala” was not a clean answer, too. I had to be more specific here, was it my father’s side? or the place my mother came from?

Whenever I think of why I’ve struggled the most with the “Where are you from?” question, I now think that it doesn’t have anything to do with any proximity to a geographical location at all.

For a long time, Coimbatore was the easiest approximation I had for home. I was born there, I grew up there, my school friends were there, my parents and my sister too. So that was definitely capital H, Home. But ever since moving out from Coimbatore to take up my undergraduate studies, and eventually being more distant with my shift to Delft, and then London, the definition of home, Coimbatore remained the same.

It was only when I lost my dad, that the whole constituents of the definition of home started disintegrating. When I went back to Coimbatore after losing my dad, I found myself wondering whether Coimbatore was still my home at all. The city had not changed in any fundamental way, and some of my friends, people I had studied with all the way until twelfth standard, were still there. The place remained unchanged, but the meaning attached to it had changed.

You have people often quoting ‘home is where the heart is’, and as annoyingly cliched it sounds, it’s true. Home is an essence, that’s the sum of a large number of experiences, and in my case, it was spread across different places.

When I think of home, I now think of the overnight train journeys I used to take with my parents to Kannur from Coimbatore, where the egg biryani was served for dinner by the railway caterers, and in the evenings, the chai (sweet, milky tea) and the onion pakoda (crispy onion fritters). I think of the traditional festivals such as Onam, Kerala’s harvest festival, and Vishu, the Malayalam New Year, where a ridiculous variety of dishes were served on a banana leaf, as is customary during festive meals in Kerala. I think of waking up to the peacocks in the morning; an important constituent of the Coimbatore soundscape. I think of the velaatams in Kerala, ritual performances associated with local temple traditions, where we used to meet Muthappan, a folk deity worshipped widely in northern Kerala, and seek his blessings.

None of these things by themselves can be called home, and they do not even belong to the same geographical location, but together they seem to produce something closer to what I would call, “home” If home was not a pincode, then what was it?

And increasingly, when I think about this, I realise that the memories I had with my dad himself, was one of the things I had understood as home without ever naming it that way.

During Onam and other celebrations, when I was staying outside Kerala for work, mom and dad would send things to me and my sister. We could be living somewhere completely different, including London, and these things would arrive from him and mom, carrying a small part of what we associated with being back home. Metaphorically, I thought of this in a way that “home” was brought to us. Even while we were situated in London, even though we were not with mom and dad.

It took losing my dad to realise that Dad was home to me. The yearly parcels shipped from India to London, would never be touched and wrapped by his hands.

And I miss home. And I would continue to live with this unbearable suffering of continuing to miss him. And through the suffering, I remember him and remember home.