What Home Means After Growing Up

I used to think home wasn't address.

A place you could type into Google maps without even thinking I house with familiar walls, the smell of food coming from the kitchen, and a cupboard full of things you never really look that. That's what home men to me for years.

Then I left for College.

Nobody really tells you the hardest part is not leaving. It's coming back.

The first time I come home after almost four months. I had imagined it so differently. I thought everything would feel exactly the same. I even counted days before my train. I had already decided what I wanted to eat first comma my mother's aloo paratha with too much ghee, the one she always say are "not that good" even though they taste better than anything I can buy outside.

When I finally reached home, my mother hug me for a little longer than usual. My father ask the same question Indian parents always ask before anything else, "Journey thik thi?" I smiled and said yes.

Everything looked familiar.

And yet.... Something was a different.

My room was exactly where I had left it did not feel like my room and you more. There were books on the shelf that I had forgotten reading. Old school trophies covered with dust. Even my favourite hoodie somehow looked small. I sat and my bed thinking "Was this room always this quite?". Maybe it was. Maybe I had changed instead.

I don't know when growing up happened. There was not any dramatic movement. It came slowly. Somewhere between learning to wash my own clothes missing family dinners pretending hostel food was edible, and calling home just to hear someone ask "Khana kha liya?"

That question used to annoy me. nNow it comforts me.

There is a quote by Maya Angelou that I really love: The ache for home lives in all of us. Earlier I thought cement a building. Now I think she meant people.

One evening during my last visit home, electricity went of because of heavy rain. Instead of complaining, all four of a set on the balcony full stop my father started telling stories from his college days half of which I still think are exaggerated. My mother kept correcting him every 2 minutes. We had chai, pakora and somwhow laughed at absolutely nothing.

It lasted maybe an hour.

But I still remember it more clearly then entire weeks from last semester.

Funny isn't it?

Sometime is the moment we never plan becomes the ones we miss the most.

Living away from home has also taught me we are things. Like how expensive coriander is venue actually have to buy it yourself. Or how quickly clean clothes disappear. And no matter how much confidence I have, I still end up calling my mother to ask "How long Do I cook rice?" she never laugh she just tells me... again.

Maybe growing up changes what home means. It is not the walls or the old furniture that I miss. It's the people who makes the place feel alive. Home is where I don't have to pretend I am okay, where someone remembers how I like my tea, and where I never feel like a guest. I guess that's the beautiful thing about home it does not ask who you have become. It simply let's you come back.