I was dozing off at work one evening, when I got the news that would eventually culminate in this project.
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“Amra ei bari ta bikri kore debo. Onno bari dekhbo,” my mother said on the phone: We’ll sell our home. And look for another house.
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The casual tone my mother employed for this colossal piece of information jolted me out of my trance. It was around 9 pm on one of those Saturday nights when I had to work night shifts on support projects. The staccato of keyboards and a defeatist chatter of people, eager to leave as soon as their shifts were over, enveloped me.
“But, why?” I was shocked.
It was true that by 2019, it had been five years since I left home for college for the very first time and since then, my stays at home had been restricted to a couple of months at most. As the years went by, my attachment to my childhood home had grown weaker, and in my mind, “going home” had slowly changed to “going to my parents' house.”
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Yet it was the place where I’d spent most of my formative years—a building whose walls came of age alongside me, evolving from a mere brick-and-mortar lump into a liveable sanctuary.
“Well, you know why. The neighborhood’s gone to the dogs…,” she sighed. “Anyway, we finally have the money now—what better way to use it?”
A long silence.“Yeah I know but that money is all you guys have as savings,” I pointed out.
“Well, so what? We can move to an apartment. Who’s going to care for the house when we die? You have no plans to return, do you? And at least, an apartment isn’t that big. It’s more manageable for two oldies like us.”
I couldn’t disagree. I had no plans to go back. Still, I was stunned at this split-second revelation of what felt like a seasoned ploy.
HOME / House
“So has this plan been on for a while? Have you guys already chosen an apartment?” I asked.
“What plan? No plan. But we’ve looked at some options. There’s one that we liked, it’s in a gated community; it’s modern and the neighbors there are better than here. There’s no reason why you won’t like it.”
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I didn’t ask her why she thought I’d like it.
“Our savings won’t pay for it all. For the deposit, we might have to sell our home first.”
“The flat isn’t ready yet, but will be by mid-next year –that’s what they’re promising. We might have to live in a rented place for a few months,” she continued.
After ten minutes of pleading with her to be cautious before diving into such a momentous life change and my mother–always self-sure–vehemently justifying the decision, I acquiesced. The burgeoning detachment from my home I’d been feeling lately, fueled my reluctance to protest this curveball that my parents were fine with throwing at themselves and at me.
A century ago, in her cri de cœur hailing Modernism, Virginia Woolf wrote: “On or about December 1910 human nature changed.”
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In 2020, a similar seismic shift occurred, cleaving human history into two distinct epochs: the pre-pandemic and the post-pandemic. The promise the flat authorities had made to my parents about the construction’s completion date now rang hollow.
The entire world plunged into lockdown and India swiftly followed suit, curtailing everything except essential goods and services.
Construction ground to a halt with no definite timeline for resumption. By then, my parents had sold our original home and were now confined in a rented two-room space, their dream of moving into a new flat in the next couple of months gathering dust.
It wasn’t until the waning months of 2021 that the construction finally concluded. In the intervening years, my parents moved from one rented house to another, holding onto the hope that the lockdown would soon lift, only to grapple with the realization of their miscalculation later.
My visits, limited by intermittent withdrawals and reinforcements of social-distancing restrictions, unfolded in different rented houses each time.
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Challenges amounted to hundreds – conflicts with landlords, spatial limitations, my mother’s rapidly deteriorating mental and physical health, and at one time, even their inability to install an air conditioner in a rented place just for the summer months.
In my mother tongue Bengali, there exists no distinct terminology for home and house–it’s always baari. The distinction between ‘my home’ and ‘my friend’s house’ doesn’t arise: depending on your worldview, you could call it a shortcoming of the language or a blessing, or both. Bengalis use the same term for both: returning to our own baari and visiting a friend’s baari.
In those two migratory years, while my parents nonchalantly spoke of different rented baari-s and dismissed our original baari, I found myself lost in translation. While the home I spent most of my childhood years in was sold and was now sheltering a new family (who had made it their new home), I was hopping from one house to another, never wanting to replace house with home.
Fast forward to the present: my parents have relocated once more, selling the flat they’d pined for two long years—the very catalyst for the house and home conundrum.
According to them, the neighbors and the locale–two things they’d raved over before moving in– had turned out to be “ghoulish.”
I’ve been to this new house a few times now. Red-oxide floors, grainy walls, high ceilings—it bears the archetypal Bengali architecture with a bit of Indian small-town, middle-class kitsch (vitrified tiles, sliding windows) thrown in.
I have a room of my own on the first floor; the separation provides me necessary detachment from the minutiae of the routine family life my parents (who live on the ground floor) engage in.
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Yet dubbing this house as my new home seems like a distant prospect.
What started as a way to cope with the loss of a home, to understand the nuances of multilingualism through two words, house and home that have no respective counterparts in my mother tongue, and to trace the lifecycle of a house until it becomes someone’s home, soon evolved into something far-reaching and deep, a project with no end in sight.
My life is only a third over, as per the statistical wisdom of several medical websites, and there will be many new houses where I’ll live, possibly longer than in my childhood home. Can I ever elevate these houses to the pedestal on which I’d put my original home? Will any of these ever truly become my home?
Or will I remain homeless forever, haunted by the specter of that long-lost building?