I do not want to belong anywhere but wish to have a home someday

How does it feel

To be without a home

Like a complete unknown

Like a rolling stone

Bob Dylan

The definition and meaning of Home and Belonging vary with different individuals and circumstances. While traditionally it is for most the house they spent their childhood in, for others, they can be miles away from the place of their birth and family, staying alone in a new city, but feel at home even there. What is home but just a place to lay your head under a roof? What is home but just a safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned? What is home but just a place in our minds? I got a chance to debate on this because of a module called Critical Appreciation in my college.

I had heard of Vikram Seth but had never read anything he had written. But I share the eminence of having studied in the same Graduation College as him. I read his poem Homeless recently.

I moved to Mumbai very recently to pursue a diploma in Journalism and Mass Comm. from the Xavier Institute of Communications.

I was born and raised in Darjeeling, a four-district small hilly town in the northern part of West Bengal. Contrary to popular belief, the inhabitants of Darjeeling, though use the misnomer “Nepalese” to identify themselves, are in fact not from Nepal at all. It goes back to the times before the British entry into India. India as a whole, as a concept, as a nation was built only after 1947; even then, only after annexing princely states like Hyderabad, Kashmir, the north-east and most recently, Sikkim. As I identify myself belonging to this community, I too, for a long time used his term. The fact that there is in existence a separate country called Nepal,  whose inhabitants also identify themselves as Nepalese, their counters across the Indian border have been facing discrimination for a long time now based on the origins of their ancestry, and most importantly loyalty.
The truth is thus: the situation is much like that of the Punjabis living in Pakistan, and Muslims in the NWFP region, who after 1947, suddenly found themselves in a new nation, where they were a minority; in a land which until a few moments ago was their own but now someone else’s – a stranger in their own land.

There’s a vital difference between land and country.

I moved to Delhi in 2007 to pursue my graduation in history form St. Stephens College. I lived in the city for four years and faced more discrimination in that period for the way I looked than all of my life put together. I had never felt ‘different’ in Darjeeling. In Delhi, it was ensured that I felt this way at all times. A sense of being uprooted from a place and being tossed aside, in a place where no one wanted me, but a place my heart could never let go frustrated me. I struggled everyday to prove, by speaking in broken Hindi and sounding like a fool, that I too belonged there; that this was my homeland too. Despite the efforts I made, this sense of longing for a place to call my own, where I am accepted for who I am, never left me. I have struggled to possess something that is truly mine and no one else’s. I felt like no amount of effort I made was ever enough.

I think it was around this time that I decided may be I don’t want to belong to any country, and developed a more wholesome and universal view of the world around me. I decided not to belong to anyone. At once, I had severed all ties with all that I thought belonged to me, what I was, what I was brought up to believe was mine and just be part of everything - humanity at large.

This is where Franz Kafka’s short pieces – Home Coming and The Departure – suddenly started making sense to me and in a way, helped me cope with this certain pain and void of loss that I’d been experiencing for so long. I started to view myself as something that needs to go out into the world and not get tied down to ties that do nothing but divide people into categories of race, religion, sex, colour, sexual preferences; just like the master in the departure says “I don’t know, just out of here, just out of here, nothing else, it’s the only way I can reach my goal…out of here that’s my goal.”, I felt the familiar home stifling and suffocating me. It took me time to gain the strength to accept that ‘home’ is not where I belong. I am made to experience the world in its entirety. I can identify with this story because this is exactly how Bombay makes me feel. Bombay has unburdened me of the ties that I ever felt towards any caste or religion or community that I belonged to. I feel liberated and have opened up in my acceptance of everything that my life is, along with everything that comes with it. Until now, everything that I labeled myself as was given to me by default at birth, by my father, but Bombay has helped me recognize and carve my own identity. I feel like myself at last. I am truly happy here and this is where I feel most at home. the severance was so complete that I became aloof from everything that I had trusted was mine; I was forced to disown it; After this, when I went back home too, just like Kafka in home-coming, questions that had never arisen before “do you feel you belong, do you feel at home?” cropped up. Sadly, I heard my heart say “I don’t know, I feel most uncertain.”The disconnect was so strong that like Kafka I came to the sad realization, “what use can I be to them, what do I mean to them, even though I am the son of my father…’

But maybe this sense of joy that I feel after severing ties with the suffocating compartment of identities that I was being forced to live in is just a juvenile phase of rebellion, an insane destructive spree triggered because of the quarter-life crisis, a fight against the fear of turning out to be exactly like my birth expects of me. May be a day will come when I will regret and feel ashamed for having abandoned and disrespected my birth and heritage. But the only reason I can sway this far away, is because I know, that after all this has stopped fascinating me and exciting me, there is a place, where the just sight of it in print warms my heart. I can go back to this place whenever I please; whenever I want, without an ounce of doubt that it will welcome me back with both arms wide open, just as the father in the parable of the Prodigal Son taken from Luke Chapter 15, verses 11-32, in the Bible, accepts his irresponsible and wayward son.

Home is wherever you’re at peace. Five years ago, for me it was the place I was born in. Today, that is not the case. After a few years, what I identify as home today might change altogether.

This module and its chosen theme made me realize that I have become a person who craves for home but does not necessarily belong to anything or anyone. This stems from the basic realization that has come after staying away from home for more than five years and after having undergone the process of self-discovery, and can be best summed by what François Tremblay, (incidentally) a Canadian short track speed skater and five-time Olympic medalist once said “When you belong, it is based on the worst in you – racism, nationalism, hatred of strangers, excluvism. You feel belonging to ‘your country’ based on a contrast with ‘other countries’, you feel belonging to ‘your race’ in contrast to all others, you feel belonging to ‘your religion’ in contrast to ‘all others’.

So, I do not want to belong to anything but wish to have a home someday.