The Home I Used to Know

Calling a place home comes easy to me. Most houses that I've stayed in, fortunately, have become home; so have many people, and they continue to be. But there is one image in particular that comes unbidden every time someone utters the word home……that of a seven year old running around in a mosaic floor (all Indian millennials will know the exact pattern I'm thinking of), darting from room to room, looking at the old TV, trying to scale the bookshelves. She appears to look around the house as if it holds answers to all the mysteries in the universe, as if she didn't experience the greatest loss of her life little less than a year ago in that very same house.

I definitely came into my own person in college but I think I started to see it take shape in that house. Almost like an unfinished Monet painting, or one that was looked at too closely - as what looked like random paint blotches, waiting for an experienced observer to view it from a distance to get a perspective on the bigger picture. That house witnessed moments of the girl I was to be – the beginning of quiet dissent, the filtering and careful choosing of words, and sadly the origins of a cynical mind. It seems like another lifetime now, but somehow all too familiar.

When we talk about growing up, I have heard people say mushy stuff like, “it's good to see you as you were supposed to (and have now) become, not as you were”. But whenever I think of meeting people from my childhood, I get scared — what if “who I was” is still etched in their memory that they can't see who I've become. I think it's a – formerly gifted, currently burned out – kid thing. Perhaps, how I feel about my childhood home is similar.

Coming back to my native place means that I have the opportunity to pass my first home quite a few times (it's still in my family). When I first moved out, what I thought I'll miss the most was my dad's burial plot right behind it. Now that I think about it, that tomb has a life of its own and in my memory, is detached from the house itself. What I miss the most is the seven year old I was. I feel like the crusty walls of that house have trapped and calcified her essence. The funny thing is, I don't know if I want it back.

The house is now rented to a ‘Bible College’. I don't know if I'm relieved that it is no longer occupied by a family. Initially when I heard that it would be rented, I kept thinking of the family who would get to live there, and for the first time in my life, I felt jealous of someone who I didn't even know existed. That house became the Schrodinger’s Cat for me for a bit. But I kept thinking about it, like NIKI sang,

The apartment we won't share

I wonder what sad wife lives there

Have the windows deciphered her stares?

Do the bricks in the walls know to hide the affairs? - The apartment we won't share, NIKI

(Admittedly, this is a lot more heartbroken than I feel about it since they are mourning a person as well)

Now that I've had enough distance and quite a few homes in between, I can revisit it with bittersweetness. Am I glad that all that my childhood home occupies are students and their frustrations? I don't know. Being a college study hall means that it will inevitably be connected to some difficult times and not the coziness of a house. But then, I'm quickly reminded of the quiet corners in my own colleges that felt like home….and reluctantly remind myself how much I needed them, like these people do. As the kids are studying to be pastors (presumably), I wonder if they sing the same hymns that my mom and dad used to sing during the morning prayer, the ones that I was too sleepy to properly enunciate. I think the walls would like that. I wonder if I forgot to carry any of my dad's precious collection of books and if a hapless student chanced upon it and fell in love with reading. I daydream that my stamp and coin collection that I misplaced was found by a young student who possibly wonders what kind of child lived there. Maybe there's someone in that house who's thinking about me like that in a parallel dimension.

Sometimes I try to imagine what I’d have done if I found that a family lived there. If there was a little girl in the house, would I compete with her in my dreams? Or would I tell her about the small gap in the back wall through which she can throw stones to the pond nearby?; or let her know that the mango tree on the left had sweeter mangoes than the other one? Would I act like the older Pevensies who let go of Narnia and gave them to the younger ones?

All these musings are inevitably juxtaposed with ‘what ifs’. What if that seven year old never left? That line of thinking doesn't usually bode well for me; usually it takes me to a version of myself that is highly rich and successful, and is envied by many. Since I don't know if that's what I even want and more importantly, since I know that there are some parts of me that I would not trade for the world, I take an alternative route of thinking. I believe that I had to leave that home to be what I am now.

I find a great deal of solace in the concept of “controlled burn” – if there's a part of the forest that's prone to wildfire that could spread to more healthy parts, they burn it before it gets a chance to go up by itself. Essentially, burning parts of something to keep it alive. The fireplace in my mind will have the ashes of some memories of this house and parts of me, I suppose.

I take comfort in the fact that I can still visit it and it still resembles my home from the outside. They say feet leave homes, not the heart, but I'm not so sure. I feel a longing for the simplicity of the life I had there, but I'm not sure if my heart is in there. Is that what the Welsh meant by hiraeth? Maybe I'll find forgotten versions of me haunting those corridors with termites; maybe I'll find some dusty dreams that will undoubtedly trigger my allergies. Maybe one day I will look at that house and see something other than ‘what could have been’. For now, it's still my old home that I no longer live in. It's still not someone else's, not quite. They are renters, they'll leave . So till my brother decides to sell it, I can keep haunting that house — its big rooms that made me think privacy was a given at all homes (oh, the privilege) and the silence in there that made the imaginative girl who uses too many metaphors and analogies in blog posts.