More than twenty six years ago, I left New Delhi, India to follow my peripatetic husband on a journey that would take us across two new continents and four different cities. Until then my birthplace Delhi, was the only home I had known. Most of my family and all my friends lived there and frankly, I had never imagined leaving that comfortable zone of familiarity except for travel and tourism. In the years since the initial uprooting, the idea of home has undergone dramatic changes in my mind, as has the definition of comfort zone. What exactly is home for any one of us? Where the heart is or where the hearth is? Is it the place we ourselves grew up in or where we bring up our children? Do we define it by the food, the smells, the climate or the faces around us? Or is much of it in our minds?
For ages humans have left their homes in search of food and adventure, as also in fear. They have set down new roots in unfamiliar landscapes . Having done so, they have surely at one time or another reflected back on that decision and wondered if their lives were better or worse for having left. Good and bad fortunes are both ascribed to the decision to leave one's homestead.
Severing ties with once familiar surroundings can come about in two ways - voluntarily and involuntarily. For some it is a deliberate choice of a new life in a new place. Others leave under the threat of natural or man made disasters. There is no doubt that the initial trauma and the feeling of helplessness is much greater for the latter group. But after years, when things have settled down and a modicum of normalcy returns, do things even out? Do those who are violently uprooted from their nests continue to pine for their loss longer and more keenly than those who leave peacefully? During WWII did European Jews fleeing the horror in their homeland miss Poland, Germany, Hungary and Lithuania once they found safe haven elsewhere? Or were they able to shed their attachment for the "home" that didn't accord them dignity and provide sanctuary? Will Palestinian refugees ever accept a peace settlement with Israel without a "right of return" clause? Are displaced persons from war torn regions more or less nostalgic about their homes than immigrants such as myself who chose to relocate under placid circumstances? Or is it all in our head, how rooted or uprooted we feel in one place or another?
Both of my parents and my father- in-law lost their ancestral homes during the partition of India to what was to become Pakistan (east & west). My own parents came from the eastern wing of partitioned India which saw far less sustained violence than the western part to which my husband's family belonged. My parents' side of the family lost considerably more in material wealth and social standing than did my in-laws. Yet there was a dramatic difference in the way the two families chose to remember their loss. Although their circumstances had been seriously and even brutally altered, my parents and other close relatives went on to live reasonably comfortable lives in India, going about their business in a forward looking manner. They explained the partition in terms of politics, history and the perfidy of the British. Their progeny (me included), born in independent India in safe and peaceful circumstances heard their stories and in their imagination, often conjured up a sense of loss more wrenching than the refugees themselves felt. But that is always the peculiar burden of subsequent generations - to feel more helpless, more enraged and more emotionally bereft for the sufferings of their elders. The victims themselves who live through the terror and the humiliation manage to often remember their experience with aloofness and perhaps even triumph, looking back at discrete events which they managed to survive against all odds.
Like my family, my father-in-law too did well for himself in east Africa (he left India soon after the partition) and in India where he returned several years later. But to this day, he remains very sentimental about his interrupted life and his erstwhile home from where he and his family escaped with little more than the shirts on their backs. He witnessed widespread violence during the bloody mayhem that accompanied India's wrenching territorial partition and population exchange. A noted Urdu writer, my father-in-law has written extensively on his experience and that of others during these traumatic times. One of his most acclaimed books tells the story of Indian Muslim refugees in Pakistan transforming their new domicile in Karachi into the Indian city of Lucknow from where they were displaced, brick by brick in their dreams. His literary account of the losses on both sides of the border vacillates between regret, fear and doubt - sometimes harshly critical, sometimes sadly sentimental and always nostalgic. Unlike my own family, my husband's parents have visited Pakistan several times - until fairly recently. I have often wondered why my father-in-law couldn't let go of the memories while my own parents were able to. Was it because he made the partition his literary genre and therefore it remained on his mind long afterwards or conversely, did he write about it because he couldn't get over the loss? Could it be that the carnage he witnessed was so etched in his mind that he bears a far greater sense of betrayal? I don't know.
Last month I came across the poem, "How Do You Like Austin?" by Maurice Leiter at Brian Leiter's blog. It is apt to quote a few lines from the poem here.
How do you like your new home? ...
But isn't it different from New York?
I am different from them both.
Once the sightseeing is done,
There is really no place
That is not home.
After initial few years of slight disorientation (especially the two years in Germany), like Maurice Leiter, I too no longer fret about where "home" is. It now is a state of mind that transcends geography. I have found wonderful friends and a rhythm of life that I can enjoy almost everywhere I have lived. In the early days when I visited Delhi, I felt I was going "home." Gradually as the years went by, the return flight to the US began to acquire the feel of "coming home." Since the death of my parents, Delhi, which I still love to visit, feels less and less like the home I knew. Also, I am now much less connected to the political / social reality in India, a connection which for me, is vital to feeling at home. Delhi will never fully cease to be "home" for me - it is thoroughly integrated in my memory and my imagination. But "home" now no longer evokes a single concrete image as it did in my youth. Several others vie for that honor - places where I have been, where I am now ... and hopefully also where I will be in the future. I can now go back and forth physically between these spaces at different times and emotionally inhabit them simultaneously. All feel equally comfortable and I don't have the need to transpose one upon the other to create an illusion of the perfect "home."
T.S. Eliot said, "Home is where one starts from". The poet has captured for me what or where "home" is. Where do you feel you started from ?
Posted by: manoj | May 24, 2007 at 11:52 PM
If I accept the definition that you and Eliot put forward, the obvious answer to your question would be Delhi. However, the whole point of my essay is that things are not as simple as that, at least for me.
Posted by: Ruchira Paul | May 25, 2007 at 08:44 AM
Similar to you, "home" for me is no longer a nostalgic term, I no longer wish to "find it", or feel its absence. Home for me is wherever I am, as long as I feel alert and engaged there, and have a few human relationships to add spice to life.
Posted by: Shunya | May 25, 2007 at 12:32 PM
That's the skill of the poet. He is not being nostalgic, merely giving us a pithy definition of 'home.' Every place we go to thereafter can be put down to 'exploration.'
Posted by: manoj | May 25, 2007 at 12:36 PM
Wow! Beautifully said. Having left delhi couple of years back. I can relate to this.. If not completely , in bits.
I dont remember where i picked it from.. I always believed..
"Home is where heart is.." Liek others, my home has been many places, Hostel Dorm, Paying guest corner, Parents ' home, In-law's home.. My rented home.. May be some future owned home.. Where I put my heart and its dwelling.. its been home for me..
But your post does ignite couple of interesting points to reflect on..
It was treat to read..
Zeya
Posted by: zeya | May 25, 2007 at 06:43 PM
On one side of this sentimental divide are those who are fixated on the starting point, like my father in law, Manoj and T.S. Eliot. On the other, there are those like Zeya who are ready to move on within a couple of years of leaving where they started from. I am with Shunya and Maurice Leiter, the other poet. We are of course all speaking for ourselves.
I look for (and luckily, find it) social connections and intellectual stimulus wherever I live, within the community at large, rather than seek familiar solace in an insular circle based on the memories of the "home" I left behind. The latter would have been easy enough to do, based on comfort level in most US cities where there are large enough ex-pat Indian communities, many of whom live the dual reality of the "economic home" and the "cultural, spiritual home" here. But doing that would have blunted my "exploratory" instincts and preserved "home" in a wishful and static world of amber - pretty enough as an image but a dead relic nonetheless, something that is unappealing to me.
The reality of where we are "going" is just as valid as where we "came" from. And home can be anywhere on that trajectory if one doesn't depend exclusively on familiar externalities to define "home."
Posted by: Ruchira Paul | May 25, 2007 at 07:23 PM
Ruchira,
The operative word here is 'home' with all its related connotations. You can subsequently live in houses and apartments in various countries, but 'home' has a very specific meaning, a special connectedness and in some ways a reference point from where you compare all other experiences. It is not necessarily nostalgic, it simply is. The future on the other hand is unknowable and god knows where we are going. it may not quite be 'home.' What if we land up in jail doing a life term ?
Posted by: manoj | May 26, 2007 at 12:01 AM
"What if we land up in jail doing a life term?"
An immigrant who lands up in jail might as likely see the last place in which she lived as "home" as the place where she was born. Cases in which longtime American residents are threatened with deportation after being charged with crimes provide cruel demonstrations of this shifted identification.
If the future's unknowable, the past is often incomprehensible, and expecting identification with it can be every bit as horrific as contemplating identification with a jail. Aside from a minimal strain of Fiddler on the Roof nostalgia for a vanished world-- arguably defined as much by the sense of community and self-containment as by the location-- I know of few Ashkenazim who pine for Russia and Poland (Viennese and Hungarian Jews are a different story). But, perhaps I just no longer know enough first generation folks, and my father would have a different perspective on this. The first generation Ashkenazim from backgrounds similar to mine whom I have known were a handful of Hebrew school teachers and friends' grandparents who immigrated after WWII, and they presented in a way that I knew instinctively, even as a kid, not to query them about their past.
In a recent exchange about visiting the Jewish quarter in Prague that I had with another American Jewish friend, she captured an ambivalence that I, too, feel about the Old Country: "I guess I always have a love-hate relationship ... when I visit; it's beautiful, I'm enjoying myself, I like the cheese and the beer, and then every once in a while I think, ____ you all. You never deserved us anyway."
My mother's family, with whom I mostly have little contact, are typical white Midwesterners: layers of immigrants from many places at many times, constantly moving from one small town to another. Typical of them and of me, I can never remember if my grandmother was born in El Dorado, Kansas and my great-grandmother in Pueblo, Colorado, or vice versa.
My nuclear family moved eight times by the time I was eleven years old, except for a brief stint in London mostly within the United States, so I have no sense of a starting point within this country, either. It doesn't bother me, though it does give me a fascination with the phenomenon of having a strong sense of place.
It strikes me as humorous that the sentiment, "home is where one starts from" should be attached to T. S. Eliot, a man who seems to have identified far more with Europe than with his actual birthplace, St. Louis, Missouri. It's like reading, "Henry James said, 'There's no place like home.'" I'd be interested to know the context of the Eliot line.
I enjoyed your post, Ruchira, which is (as usual), both interesting and quite beautifully written. I think my father, who is closer to the immigrant experience than I am, would enjoy it-- I'll have to send him the link.
Posted by: Anna | May 29, 2007 at 12:04 PM
Thanks Anna. If your father reads this, I hope he will leave us a comment. I'd love to hear his point of view.
Posted by: Ruchira Paul | May 29, 2007 at 12:35 PM
I think that the old saying had it right - Home is best defined as a state of mind ('Home is where the heart is') rather than a physical location.
Having just taken a vacation in one of those 'all comforts of home, away from home' rental places at Deep Creek, MD, I had a nagging feeling that I was missing all kinds of essential chores that needed to be done to keep life chugging along.It didn't help that the rental came with instructions on how to leave the place in near pristine condition when leaving, as a 'courtesy to the next guests/home owners'. So bad was this 'homesickness', that rather than reading the plentiful supply of trashy romance novels thoughtfully provided by the owners for light reading,I spent my time in the house loading the dishwasher a zillion times a day, watering and re-watering the pitiful pansies till they drowned, making beds that remain largely unmade at home- Why do we strive to create a 'home' away from our real current home? Beats me!
Of course, paralysis on the home front set in once we got back. So we sit at work in front of the computer, leaving piles of clothes to moulder in the dryer, floors unswept, lawns unmowed, which leads me to a slightly different definition of home. Home is where we are free to be all we want to be - slobs or fitness freaks or cleanomaniacs or computerlimpets or...
Posted by: Sujatha | May 30, 2007 at 05:22 AM