Home

As a young migrant who has travelled throughout their life, from one place to another, I have never settled down on a land for enough a time to call it home.

This often bothered me, no land to call my own, no people to refer to as mime, no room that I can claim to hold my childhood and no roots to my stems. As kids we were often asked in class about our hometown, I could never answer.

I grew up crying and being nostalgic about a place that did not even exist, craving to go back to a place that is not even real.

Over time, I grew up to finding my owm solutions to this problem. I believed if I could settle in one place, I could create a homeland. I could give myself what wasn’t inherently given to me.

But as it happened, with every city that we moved to, as soon as I grew to love it enough to call it home, we left it.

I passed my 12th from Delhi and always thought I would go to college there, eventually as the time for my joining came, we had to move away.

Subsequently, I moved to Kolkata, doingy UG from a college there. I was heartbroken over Delhi. But I eventually found friends in Kolkata, became accustomed to it, even started to like it. I grew to know every street and the directions of the wind like the palm pf my hands. I started loving it so much that Kolkata became a big part of me. Visiting my parents was just a visit, and i often found myself craving to go back to Kolkata. It had become home.

As my Bachelors ended, I wasn’t ready to leave Kolkata. I reapplied for my Masters to the same college, in the greed to stay back. I was unfortunately not accepted. My college was one of the best of India and it was pretty easy for Alumni to gain admission, yet i was not accepted.

But in my stubbornness to stay back in Kolkata, I applied to another college, getting in easily.

I finally had found home and I wasn’t letting go of it.

The firat few days were as serene as home is supposed to be, eventually all my friends left for better opportunities, people who stayed back made new friends and changed put of the blue. The air started to feel suffocating and the streets grew puddles that Id fall into.

The city was still the same, but it was not home anymore.

I started to get claustrophobic in open air and i wanted to leave, to anywhere- Anywhere but here.

It started hitting me then, God has a plan, to temper with it is to tenper with your wellness. I learned why it was important to leave in time.

I learned that if you live in a city you love for ling enough, you begin to find reasons to hate it.

I learned that calling a place hometown is only a cliche with no roots, Larkin had already told me this “I remember, I remember” but all I could remember was the romantic nature of idealising things that aren’t real.

Home is within you. Homeland is only a way of making people gight one another.