November 2022.
Standing in my maternal grandparents’ garden, I trace the carving of my name on a giant palm tree. It makes me smile because I’ve always had a notorious habit of scribbling my name everywhere I go. Notebooks and receipts get discarded; a tree in your grandparents’ garden, however, does not. Not yet, at least.
I have a vague memory of this act: In the fading archives of my mind, the palm tree and I — we’re both much shorter and youthful. I tilt my head upwards to get a better look. The leaves are farther than the JPEG file permanently saved in my mind. “Oh, how tall you’ve grown!” I think. The words are reminiscent of a low-effort, cliché icebreaker from an elderly relative.
There are many such visible markers of my roots in my grandparents’ house. For example, the living room has a huge pillar that looks quite odd at first glance. Go closer and you’re bound to notice little markings with initials next to them. Each time I go back, I like to run my fingers over these little scribbles and mentally guess the full names behind those initials.
Sometimes, I idly hug the pillar as if it were a friend.
My mother often tells me that she does not feel too emotionally attached to the houses she’s lived in. It’s something I don’t relate to because her parents’ house is probably the only house I’m so attached to. For her, a home comprises people, relationships, and memories. But then again, living hundreds of kilometers away from where she was born, she’s had to set up a ‘home’ from scratch more than just a few times. Thereby diluting the significance of any brick-and-mortar setup.
In a simplistic way, all of world history is just about the fight for a home. The key difference between the oppressors and the oppressed can be defined in terms of how easy or difficult it is for either party to own, establish, and protect their home(s). Home, then, is just a pool of resources that ensures survival. But no one likes to think of it like that. It’s probably easier to think of a home as an abstract, romantic concept rather than a series of political transactions. The former is a lot more exciting and fluid.
For the longest time, I thought of my home in terms of my relationships, feelings, and ideas. It wasn’t until my parents put their hard-earned savings into the property of a builder who turned out to be a fraud that I realized a fact — no home is safe. A home is always under threat. It’s ironic that something can be such a great source of both comfort and insecurity.
Today, I’m reading about the plight of the residents of Joshimath and feeling more certain about the instability of a home. Having your own home/house is often deemed a symbol of success. But we forget that there’s a world of difference between the early humans settling down near water bodies and the large-scale, unchecked urbanization of today. Joshimath is a victim of human apathy, climate change, politics, corruption, urbanization, and so much more. It’s an unfortunate reminder that the conversation is bigger than deciding if one should buy a house or continue to live on rent forever.
Leaving you with one of my favourite songs that fits the theme of this newsletter but is considerably more cheerful.