Dubious Moves

The standard reply, of course, is that it where the heart is. Is it really so ? And that heart, it is transferable? You put it into a family, a friend, and it is packed and ready to go? And what happened to the home in this place ? Is it the same home that you carry?

We are all pragmatists, by physical constraints if not by choice. We may yodel out songs to the contrary, but we do not step off balconies believing we can fly, or touch the sky. That being so, a perennial search for comfort, physical and mental, means that we can make a home almost anywhere.

Almost, of course, being a big word. For example, almost everyone, from sweatshop programmer to behind –the-scenes wheeler-dealer, probably made a good living and more out of, say, Paveway. Except of course, that “almost” left out the wailing mothers and crippled children in a desolate country. Who cried not at the loss of the dead, but at the reality that the dead were probably better off.

But we digress. So almost any place can be home. And thinking over it, more than one place can be home. All the places that were home remain so. In the mind, as reality makes us stay near one home at a time. Several of those homes now only remain in the mind, because the places have re-invented themselves, and who knows, are now in the processes of becoming home to different people now.

Mere comfortable eating-sleeping places like hotel rooms cannot become home. Because their very easy adherence to your demands ensures that neither do they leave an impression on you and nor do you stamp your persona on them. In the end, home is the place where you make your own, which leaves an imprint on your persona.

Which of course, deviates from another common notion of home: as being a place that claims you. That accepts you, where you return to. In more fanciful days, one scribbled “Home is where there is a soul/ silently grieving with a me shaped hole”. But that was mere rhyming indulgence. Because people who claim to have me-shaped holes do so with a slightly discomfited air, as if abashed at the implicit admission that life goes on. That the holes are now stopped with the essential inanities of living, with TV serials about illicit affairs of bejewelled socialites.

(to be continued...)