The Safety of Homes
Saad Razi Shaikh
~ 1 ~
In early March ‘20, I found myself at the edge of a food joint spilling over to the street. The setting was suburban Istanbul, the weather was as windy as it was cold. But the soup was hot, the pide appetizing, and my spirits high. I had just cleared a Turkish language exam with better grades than I had expected. There were just the first green shoots of having not just learnt the language, but possibly internalized it, mastered it.
A few minutes into the meal, an elderly Turkish gentleman dropped by my table. I was a little apprehensive, my previous attempts to converse with the local people had not gone well, my language skills had simply not permitted as much. But this occasion was to prove to be different, the man introduced himself, asked me about my background, inquired gently about what was happening in India, touched a few political issues here and there, all before wrapping up his tea and taking his leave.
The conversation did not span more than fifteen minutes, but it left me elated, not only because he had been kind enough to pay my bill, but because I had spoken for fifteen minutes straight in Turkish, without fumbling, without reaching for the phone dictionary. As I walked back to my dormitory, with a little more strut than usual, my mind soared across the minaret-dotted Istanbul skyline. Here was a city I had dreamt of for years, here I was, a little better off than the nervous tourist I was a few months ago. I knew how to speak to locals, I had a postal address Amazon could deliver to, I could even crack jokes while ordering food, and to complete the set, I had a resident card I was only too proud to flaunt. It seemed I had arrived, a new home had been built, and with spring setting in, I was ready to hitch my boots and hike across the country.
These travel plans were not destined for fruition. The pandemic was upon our doors. Worse, the general confusion that it brought in its wake ensured that nothing stayed stable, both rules and plans flipped on a daily basis. The situation worsened, the accommodation of both me and my friends became precarious; with our stays uncertain and our movements curtailed, we were fed in places which we joked to be prisons. We were in dormitories which had barbed walls, and heavy iron gates, the food was good, the weather pleasant, yet we felt trapped in our rooms, if not our bodies. With the situation changing, new rules moving in and out, I found my room to be empty for a while, before being filled in by new people again.
Some of the people would stay for a few days, while others would last much longer. Watching new people move in was an experience in itself. Their eyes would rove around the room, their observations merging with their expectations, before the eventual slump into their beds. In the coming days, belongings would be unpacked, new objects would jostle with the old in shared storage, walls would be scanned for poster spots, shades would be adjusted, unspoken agreements drawn, all before a new normal would be established. But another shifting would bring the pendulum back to square one, a few days before it would be knocked out again.
Years back, while shifting from Mumbai to Delhi, two cities rather dear to me, I had thought that instead of one home, I would now have two. Yet the more I kept flitting in between the two cities, I felt orphaned by both, in that my idea of home had become so vast it could be limited to neither. At times, I used to skip the plane in favour of the train, even if the prices of the two were identical. Staying in a train for fifteen hours at a stretch allowed me to separate the experiences of the two cities. Watching cities travel past my compartment window, listening to new people board and disembark the train, jumping off whenever a new station came, to walk around the platform, chat with the people. All of this was to try to root myself to a place, even if my heart refused to stop, it kept pushing me to move on. To where, I would howl in protest. To infinity? No, to a place yet to be known.
Three years ago, I returned to my former apartment in Delhi. A botched-up rent agreement coupled with chronic miscommunication ensured the flat went out of my hand and my belongings out of its walls. The new tenants were, however, kind enough to place my belongings in the corner of the salon, should I ever return. I did return, only to be shocked seeing the mess my belongings were in. The fancy bamboo furniture I had bought, the wall posters I had painstakingly found, the stack of books which were my constant source of joy and worry, all were dumped in a corner, with a blue cloth and plenty of dust settled over them. As I picked through the pieces, quite literally, my eyes began to search for a poster that was most dear to me. It was not to be found. I got up, only to be drawn in a conversation with the new tenant, a young lad of eighteen, who had shifted to Delhi to start a new business. He was handsome, energetic and helpful, he apologized for the mess, he assured me if he hadn’t a lot of luggage of his own, he would have kept my belongings in their place. I asked him about the poster. He took me to the next room; the poster had found a place right over the spot he used to sleep. It was a beautifully crafted piece, with the two lines of Urdu poetry taking centre stage.
مرے جنوں کا نتیجہ ضرور نکلے گا
اسی سیاہ سمندر سے نور نکلے گا
My passion will certainly pay off.
From the dark sea, light will come.
- Ameer Qazalbash
The young man was looking at me, not sure what to do next. I shook my head.
“Keep it. And all the best.”
~ 2 ~
Towards the end of the academic year, with the pandemic in no mood to relent, I decided to head back home. The quarantine had tested my patience and the general symptoms of homesickness were just beginning to dawn upon me. But as I looked through airline tickets, not sure if the pandemic or the prices would allow the trip back home, I began to have my doubts. Was home still the place I had left and would be returning to? Or like trees in forests spotted years back, that keep growing in our absence, had the place I knew as home changed, perhaps not as a whole but certainly in visible parts? Could the trove of memories I had so carefully guarded in my mind survive the trial of the real world, wherein on returning home, I would find the arrangement of furniture different, the choices of new additions questionable and the sounds of the changing neighbourhood unfamiliar? Would I be returning to a home surviving in my mind alone? Most of all, would I be able to decipher, if at all, what had changed—me or home?
Every trip to a new place and back would rekindle old fears of never being able to settle in one place, to never be in possession of the fabled ‘room of one’s own.’ Yet, fighting as I was to make sense of my changing surroundings, if not the changing winds of my own thoughts, I tried my best to make home wherever I went. I would tidy rooms, dust corners, sweep floors, all until the shining interiors bore testimony of the one who had claimed them. I would fumble with room furniture, try to add my touch every other place, even as I knew I was a tenant there at best, that my little interior adventures would collapse at the turn of the rental year. But for the days and nights I would make myself at home, I needed to see some imprint of ‘me’ in my surroundings. I would unpack kettle and cutlery, and sipping on milk tea brewed to my own standards of imperfection. I would measure sip to breath and pretend the world was in balance.
It rained when I returned home. As I searched for my toothbrush and turned on the faucet, I could hear the familiar taps on the window pane. A part of me wanted to head back on the road, perhaps drown in the barrage of rain. Another wanted to sit by the window, to wind down after a long journey, to take bearings of the new life around me, perhaps think of new plans, make new wishlists, dream with my eyes wide open.
It rained for a week in Mumbai. And my days, locked in home quarantine, passed without much excitement. Of course, there were stories to recount, jokes to be cracked, cross-cultural bearings to be shared. Gifts to be exchanged, family to be met, neighbours to be hosted. Like the two rails of the railroad running side by side for miles, my trips to home would have me dangling one leg on home ground, while the other flew around the world.
But the intermediate periods were far from smooth. It was only to be in separation that the stark realities of relationships would unfold, wherein I would be torn between the joy of meeting some at the expense of being separated from others. Particularly stomach-turning were last meetings, talks which went for hours, wherein mutual anxieties would be traded for frivolous talks, wherein walking gaits would change, bill payment fights would arise, wherein body language would betray affection long felt yet little expressed. A friend once heard me talking about how I liked to meet new people, he insisted I was an extrovert, yet I rarely felt so, I was partial to my solo outings, even as I treasured the chance to stumble upon someone new and interesting along the way. But here was the catch, upon knowing and connecting in a criminally short span of time, we would part ways, and the melancholy of it would hold me company for the next few days.
My two-year old niece had been gifted a plastic playhouse. She quickly grew to love it, she would stack her toys and chair inside, and rule over her small kingdom. She would also invite others into the house, adult bodies would struggle considerably to make way but she wouldn’t be daunted, she would pull them in and make them comfortable. At other times, she would drag the entire playhouse with her when moving between rooms of the apartment, she literally took her house with her wherever she went. In her playful innocence, I began to grasp something about the nature of home, home was not just the routine need of shelter, it was also in laying claim to an object and building your world around it.
Home was the window through which one saw the world, only by anchoring oneself to a spot could one make sense of a fast-revolving world. It’s understandable then, that whenever I became unsure about where and for how long I would be staying next, my mind used to stop working, my productivity would drop, my insomnia would rise, and the general anxieties of everyday life would run riot, till the next place to be confused for home would come my way. The amnesia would last for a couple of months, before the cycle would commence again.
My teacher Dr. Heba Raouf Ezzat once remarked that she felt blessed to have many homes. What was home for her? A place where she finds knowledge and compassion. Much intrigued as I was by her answer, even soothed by it, I couldn’t help but wonder, could home really be thought of in the plural? What was I to make of the bewildering sensation of being neither here nor there, where every shift in dwelling would probe the familiar anxieties: where are you and where are you going? At times, the shift would be voluntary, with either my budget or my expectations out of sync with my existing dwelling. At other times, it would be the will if not the whims of others that would have me packing my bags. While both necessitated a shift, the former would offer some sense of dignity, the ‘it-happened-because-I-wanted-so’ myth, the latter would inevitably be attached to feelings of shame, with my previously unchallenged status of resident downgraded to a squatter on the pavement, who could be cajoled away, if not kicked out altogether.
All the bouquet of experiences that came my way had the familiar if not duping cycle of find-stay-belong-shift-find on repeat. At the early start of my twenties, I rejoiced in the frequent changes, even flaunting my ready-to-move disposition as some valorised hippie nomadism. But as the twenties ploughed towards the thirties, I was forced to stop, and beg of fate to give me a shelter where I could hide at will, without being yanked out by whims, and without losing yet again the fable of home and all that it brought in its wake.
Leaving home was the necessary ritual-of-passage to finally come to appreciate it. A colleague once remarked, drawing upon her decade-long experience as a refugee, that she forces herself not to like any place, for having been displaced more times than she can remember, she travels light, and treads lighter in the spaces she inhabits. Listening to her was not only an exercise in privilege check, it also gave me an insight how I packed and stayed. Travelling light was of course my visiting card, but as a friend ruefully grumbled, it was only an excuse not to stay in place, to invest time in people, to let feelings emerge and take centre-stage. I shrugged off her comments, for I had read Zygmunt Baumann on liquidity, I had been made comfortable about my discomforts.
My twenties were increasingly coming to be dominated by two strands of thought, who I was and what I would do for a living. To me, the pairing of the two as one single theme felt dishonest, if not downright ridiculous. And so, armed with family money that would run its due sooner than later, I settled on not settling, to keep walking a path many had taken before me, but which I in my naïve idealism took to be ground-breaking. I charted solo trips, fished out a living here and there as a journalist, took up odd if not dissatisfying translation jobs, hitched to a different city with the stated aim of doing a Masters, but really to get a feel of a place different than the one where I was born. None of this was revolutionary or even rebellious, for both require some passion and purpose, and these were precisely what were failing me in my early twenties, the stark awareness of floating in one mindless story after another, with no explanation or plot line in between them. Moving to new places was the remedy for stagnation, for the greatest of my fears was to be stuck and stale for decades, to rot in one single space for all my life, to be the same person today as I was yesterday. Moving out and away was key to answering the two perennial questions, ‘who am I’ and ‘where am I’; it became increasingly clear that the two questions weren’t very different from each other, nor would the answer that they would collectively yield.
~ 3 ~
My journey with 2020 mirrored the ones of millions of others, there were too many firsts which we had neither seen coming nor had any appetite for. If broken health and fractured public life were not enough, I found to my horror that the last if only bastion of my accommodation was going to shift too. A possible redevelopment plan and crumbling infrastructure ensured that the family home I had been born and raised in all my life was going to be exchanged for something newer and fancier. It would be a lie to say that I had stayed there all my life—the better part of the past decade had been spent in cities that had been as distant as they had been exciting. But home was the place of return, of carefully sitting back and calibrating life, a safe space that demanded little yet gave much. It was no longer to be.
To complete the agony cycle, the old house was to be put up for rent and I found myself in the unenviable position of acting like a sales guide to prospective renters. I would wait at my doorsteps, welcome random strangers into the house, give a quick guided tour, parry off troublesome questions, all before sitting down and getting to the practical aspect of ‘dealing’ with the property. The last such visit had me sitting by the window, a spot pregnant with more memories than I dared count. A broker was bringing a family to see the house, they had been late, and I was left to sit and think, taking stock of the place I had called home, but which now I was saddled with, as a nameless product to be dumped in the commodity market. Luckily, before the thought could gain steam and make me break into a nihilistic rage, the broker arrived, and I partnered him in showcasing the house, the space which had been sacred just a few days ago, where I wouldn’t even dream to walk in with soiled footwear, but here they were, random assorted strangers, each trouping in with little love or care for the house. And of course, with shoes fresh from the dirt of the outside world.
The house was a peculiar creature. Every room had wooden furniture built into the wall. One would guess that the first inhabitants, my parents, when purchasing the house, had fancied they would never leave it, who else would build furniture drilled to the wall? Here, sitting in the house which had grown unkempt and dusty over the past few days, here, in the company of furniture drained off its contents, here, in the ghoulish silence of what was one’s home, my mind flew to the dreams and wishes of the ones who had built the house, with great love and care, with the exuberance so peculiar to youth, of making spaces that would last one’s lifetime. It was not to be so, the space had been built, but only to be eventually bequeathed to someone else.
The shift from one house to another did not happen overnight. We began by shifting the small articles unrequired for daily usage to the new house, before eventually enlisting the service of a ‘movers and packers’ company to shift out the big items. Four men clad in identical uniforms and armed with identical tools and temperament arrived one morning and in the span of four hours had emptied out the better part of the house. My job was to be the family agent in this affair, I supervised their work, led in useful advice here and there, for I had shifted many times, albeit from temporary homes, and had gained considerable resentment and wisdom in the process. In their wake, the ‘movers’ left torn jute packing bags, unused cartons, and a general hollowness uncharacteristic of home. The ingredients of home had been transferred to the new house, it was where we would be heading and starting the new life.
But because the storage capacity of our home was formidable, I kept returning to the old house again and again, to retrieve items we had forgotten, to sort the useful from the useless, to organize what remained of the property, and perhaps most of all, to tidy and deck the house for the oncoming new owners. The problem was, in the stripping of house of its belongings, in the abandonment of it by the ones who called it home, home had become a desolate creature that felt neither new nor familiar. What had once been a cacophony of sounds had now descended into silence. The newfound quiet was hard to miss, or worse, to explain.
The neighbour kid who used to frequent our house knocked on our door many a time, but since we had long left, there was no one to open the door and welcome him in. If we were still around, he would have entered, smiled and called out my name, wrapped his tiny fingers around mine, tugged me to the toy area in the house, before sitting down and pulling me along as well. Mostly, I would play with the kid, becoming one in the process too, at other times I would work on my laptop, checking on him every now and then. In his curly hair, twinkling eyes and easy laughter, the kid reminded me much of myself.
When I was his age, I had spent many evenings playing in his house. Two decades later, the pattern would repeat, even as the role I was to play would change. The small corridor passage between the two houses was where the kid would stand, bang his small knuckles on the door, tap his feet in impatience, before the door would open and he would be let in. The corridor outside the house was a curious space, it was of the house but outside of it, it was where impatience drills would be rehearsed, hectic last-minute messages exchanged, warnings shots fired off, and final farewells submitted. It was also the place where I, whenever I used to go out, would call out to my mother, “I’m coming!”, never “I’m leaving.” Mother knew I was going out, what mattered to her was that I would be returning. Safe, sound, and willing.
My heart and feet flew in equal measure across the world, for I had been blessed with a home. Home was the lodestar tracking my movements. My last outing had been the longest and the most distant. Upon my final return, the inevitable had to happen. The lodestar had started to move too.
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Razi Shaikh is a journalist based out of India, writing primarily on popular culture and citizen's initiatives. He recently finished defending his Master's thesis at the Alliance of Civilizations Institute, Istanbul.
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