A weird concept isn’t it? Something that every single person in the world understands but has a completely unique definition of their own which keeps changing many times all along their lives. I recently sat through what home means to me when I saw my paati get a room for herself for the first time in her life at the age of 95.
A room for myself. The sentence has such a nice ring to it. A lot of people never get to experience it all their lives but every single one of us yearn for it at some point. I am 34 years old now. I got to have a room of my own for a grand total of 8 months in my life. The best 8 months of my life. period. I could only imagine what my paati would be feeling when she gets it now after living with/for/amidst/in spite of/putting up with others for 95 years in this world.
I shared a room and even the bed with both my parents all through school. That was my definition of home at that time. Being with my parents. Did not matter which locality, house, room. If I’m in the same place as my parents it meant home. I was jealous of my friends who used to boast about how they decorated their room, how they spent all night on some newly discovered mini games website alone in their own room. I had my alone time only when I faked stomach pains and toe injuries for some distant relative’s kid’s wedding. I felt like a king during those rare 3 hours of a “room for myself”. My definition of home expanded to having a space that only I control during those times.
I lived in a hostel room sharing with 3 or 4 people for all my 4 years of college. The entire hostel felt like home at that time. All the rooms belonged to everyone. All our buckets were shared. Every time someone came back from their “home”, their snacks were for all of us to finish the same night. Travelling back to Chennai once every 6 months didn’t feel like going home anymore. I would prefer staying back in the hostel even during study holidays and semester breaks sometimes because it felt more “home” to me than back in Chennai. Even though the only space I controlled for myself was a single metal cot that was also shared by others most of the time, that was the space I always wanted to be in.
My 5 years in the US was when my definition of home took a rollercoaster of mood swings. The day I left I cried my gut out at the airport. Not just because I was going to miss people. It was the first time I realised how much of “home” I had built without even noticing. The house, the city, my parents, my friends who I could call at 11pm on a Tuesday for no reason. All of it just… gone in one day. I had to start from zero and I didn’t even know what zero felt like until I was standing in it.
The first 4 years were me slowly rebuilding. New city, new people, new habits, new things to fight about. And somewhere in the middle of all that rebuilding I started feeling at home in the US. Which is also when Chennai started showing up in my head again. Not the homesick missing from the first few months. A different kind. The kind where you’re genuinely settled but your heart keeps pulling at something anyway. Like it hadn’t got the memo that you’d moved on.
My 5th year is when for the first time in my life I got to live in a room completely by myself. My own bed, a shelf for just my things, a corner for my movies, a wall I could put whatever I wanted on. This lasted 8 months and I think about it more than I should. There was a quiet anger I sat with during this time too. Anger about not having had this earlier. About how many years I spent adjusting and sharing and making do while other people just had this as a default. But mostly the child in me who was finally getting his own room took over. I was happy in a way I hadn’t been before.
But this only lasted 8 months because I decided to come back “home”. To Chennai. And I was not prepared for what that felt like. I thought coming back would feel like slipping into something familiar. It didn’t. The city was the same, my parents were the same, my room was the same. But I had changed enough that none of it fit the same way anymore. The discomfort of a home you outgrew without realising it was a hard pill to swallow. From the outside I had just “come back home”. But something about it felt off in a way I couldn’t name for months.
A few months later I got married and started sharing a space with my wife. Still a child in many ways, still trying to make every new place feel like home.
When I look back at all of it now I keep going back and forth. Every home I’ve had felt real because of the people in it. My parents, my hostel mates, my roommates in the US, my wife. Even when I complained about the space, even when I wanted something different, they all made it feel like somewhere I belonged. But then I also think about those 8 months. My own room. The specific quiet of it. The way I could leave things exactly where I put them. I complained about that space too, the size, the lights, the sounds. But I think about it more than I think about any other place I’ve lived in.
Maybe both things are true. Home is the people. And sometimes home is just a room where things are always the way you left them.
The brightness in my paati’s face when we told her she’s going to get a room for herself made me feel like I understood something I couldn’t have explained before. 95 years. And the thing that lit her up was a room of her own. Whenever you get that in your life, whatever age that is, the feeling it gives you is unmatched by anything or anyone else. Maybe there’s a word for this feeling in German somewhere.