Sliceoflife: Home is what you are

With both my children having secured admission in courses of their choice abroad, they are ready to fly the coop. They and I have been accommodation hunting. It is no easy task, considering that they would be relocating to a foreign country where real estate in one of the most expensive in the world. Apart from finding a new home, they would also be adjusting to a new lifestyle, new culture and completely new routines. Exciting, no doubt, but also stressful. The choices had to be made carefully, as this would be the place that my children would call home for the next three years, in their host country.

It set me thinking about what a home is. If I was asked to define home, I would say, it is where you come back to, after your day, hang up your shoes and go to bed. It is interesting to me, how the definition of home changes with age. When I asked a student, who is living in Bangalore, what home was, she said it was Darjeeling, where her parents lived. When I asked a four-year-old child what home was, she said it meant Mummy and Papa. When I asked my mother, a senior citizen, what home meant to her, she said it was her cottage, where she is currently residing. To my house-help, home is her village where her parents have a farm and where they grow crops. She sees her house in the city, as a temporary dwelling just to get her sons educated.

A book that I am reading now, Goat Days by Benyamin which was in the longlist for Man Asian Literary prize of 2012, and also shortlisted for DSC prize for South Asian literature, is about a Malayalee migrant worker in Saudi Arabia, who is abused, mistreated and kept in inhuman conditions. The cruelty meted out to him is so much that he wants to get arrested. The book opens with him finally managing to get arrested. His head is shorn but he laughs in glee. He is happy to make the prison his home. Benyamin describes the condition of the prison, where they lie down on hard floors without even a mattress. The heat is unbearable with the AC hardly functioning. Yet, the protagonist is happy and grateful to make this his home and he sends out prayers for this. He says “Can you imagine how much suffering I must have endured to voluntarily choose punishment?”

In a unique, brilliant project called “My room project,” John Thackwray a French photographer and a documentary filmmaker, has brought together people from 55 countries across the world. It took him six years to shoot these photos. He travelled the world, and spoke to more than 1,000 people in total in all in the age group 18-30, understanding their life stories and the choices they made, through war, poverty and economic instability among other things. The photos are all aerial view of people in their room, surrounded by the their everyday possessions. Vibrant, colourful and starkly contrasting with each other, these photos shows that place that each of them calls home. The rooms range from that of a young girl, a civil engineer in Bucharest to an actress in Istanbul, Turkey, to a painter from Tehran to an entertainer from New York and many such. When I saw the photos, I was fascinated, almost mesmerised. And thought about however different our cultures may be, how alike each one of us is.

Yet another powerful photography project, is Where Children Sleep by British photographer James Mollison. He travelled around the world, capturing photographs of children and their rooms. The difference and stark contrast is shocking. The photos include a little girl in Japan whose mother spends more than $1,000 a month on her clothes, as well as children from Nepal and Brazil, where they hardly have a roof over their heads. Each bedroom and each of the portrait photos are accompanied by the story of the child.

Where we live and how we decorate our personal spaces, speak volumes about us. I know homes where the owners fill every little nook and cranny with artefacts and curios they picked up on their travels. I know others where there is absolutely no personalisation, with homes resembling hotels as they have been designed carefully by interior designers.

Then there are those homes which like their occupants exude warmth, invite you in, make you feel welcome, and where you put up your feet and relax, with joy in your heart, a balm to your tired spirit. Those for me, are the best kind of homes.

(Preeti Shenoy is the author of eight bestselling books,the latest being a fiction titled It’s All In The Planets)