A Blog by Aarthi.
Doesn’t festivities filled with colors and joy scream home generally, even to those who aren’t pretty sentimental? This made me wonder, what do we actually miss when we say that we miss home? The building made of concrete, cement, marbles and what not? The building that gave a roof to our closest relatives for most part of growing up, irrespective of whether they were beautiful, kind, mean, loud or straight up annoying? The sheer abundance of tears, fights, joys and secrets it has witnessed does baffles me!
But, isn’t there more to it? When you plan a change, you prepare yourself to bid adieu to the things you love. You bring your yourself to come in terms with the big things. For instance, how small / big the new house relatively is or how congested or quiet the new city is! But, we forget to prepare ourselves to missing the kind neighborhood woman who always remembers to specially make you a piece of eggless cake during Christmas and how her baking fills the whole neighborhood divine!
I once read an intense poem in my school about a poetess visiting her abandoned ancestral house where she had lived with her grandparents as she was growing up. That poem stayed with me but I still dread to even think of my home as an empty, abandoned place where snakes moved! Maybe am the one who is too fragile or too attached to those pieces of bricks and mortar!
Every place that I have ever been to, has always given me a piece of itself to carry forever in exchange for a little piece of me. But, trust me, home remains special despite the imperfect shared history. Do you want to know the irony? I don’t like the concept of borders and believe that the sense of patriotism is overrated! How comfortably hypocritical! At the end of the day, what can I say except that am just a human being with highly intellectual ideals yet with a sloppy grip of them in real life. But, aren’t we all just flawed? Aren’t we all grappling to find a balance between what we consider ideal on paper and how we actually choose to live our lives? At least that is the belief that lets me sleep peacefully at nights.
I sometimes tell myself that the home is not what I miss but the people who lived there and memories of them. That I could have met that neighborhood woman anywhere. But, the fact remains that I didn’t meet her anywhere else and no better food at Christmas makes me crave less for the piece of bread she always made! Also, whenever I pass through her house , it still reeks of her warm baking smell that she had let the entire neighborhood bask in, long after she had gone.
If there is one thing that I could wish for, I would love to be a warm memory in the mind of at least one stranger, who adores telling the story of me repeatedly to people who are already annoyed at how many times they’ve heard of my story!
One Who Hated Books 