A Memory of Home

Between Time, Memory, and Life

I wrote this piece as an exploration of what “home” means to me on a deeper level, after returning home for my Deepavali holidays. I don’t know, but I felt like adding this here because it truly adds a layer of realness to my writing and puts what I write into perspective for you dear reader.

Enjoy your read and a belated Happy Diwali to everyone who celebrates the Festival of Lights!

Happy Deepavali!(Diwali to the readers who celebrate)

What is Home?

What does a home mean to you, dear reader? Well, I for one nearly don’t have enough life experience to answer that question, but I will try to explore the idea of what home is for me in this piece. Because the idea of what home is has always fascinated me ever since the time I left home for my graduation, because every place I have stayed, Home found me even when I was away.

So what is Home really? Is it just the place, the physical entity? Or is it the people? Or is it the time you spend there? Can it be all the memories a place leaves you with?

If there is one thing I know for sure, it is that home was never just about the place for me. Because I for one know how it feels to long for a home even when you are home. For me, home is much more than just a house. It is a place where I crave safety, a place where it feels warm enough to cry myself to sleep, a place where I could read till two in the night, the place where no one shouts at each other, where kids get to be kids and adults behave like ones. In my heart of hearts, I very well know that the idea of home I have constructed in my mind is a utopian idea. But I want it. I don’t know if I want it badly enough for me to chase it, but there is a desire in my heart that burns passionately to build something that’s “mine” and no one can snatch that away from me.

Love, Healing, and the Idea of Safety

The funny thing is that I have felt at home amidst people when there was love, when I was given attention, when I was asked if I was okay, when I was low, I was supported even when I was not in my home. It was the quiet irony of the idea when I understood what homes must have been. And strangely enough, it felt awkward for me.

I remember hearing this for the first time:

“We find partners and companionship in the way our parents treated us.”

Well, hear me out for a second before you jump to conclusions. If your parents did not treat you well, if they were conditional lovers, you will, for the surety of seven heavens, chase someone who does not love you back. You try to convince the other person that you are worth being loved and deserve love. Just like every time you tried but failed back home to prove that you were worth being cared for.

And yes, it’s been a canon event in my life too, and I have learnt my lessons, I have had my lessons. I needed to heal myself from the desire to please others before I wanted love. Because this is not just about love, it also accompanies the way you push people away the moment you are given even the smallest embers of love.

Because you have seen this love, you know how good it feels momentarily, but you also know that it all goes away eventually. From your experience, to protect yourself from heartbreak, you push people away even before they have a chance to break your heart. Hearing this for the first time in Good Will Hunting changed the way I looked at love and the self-sabotaging nature of my attitude towards people who were kind to me.

The Essence of Home

For me, home has never just been about the idea of a place. For me, home is about the love of my mum’s food, the warmth of the bed, the coziness I feel within my bedsheet, the feeling of awe that hits me every single time I see my book collection, the eerie excitement and tension that I feel in my stomach when I think of meeting my homies again after months of not seeing each other, the happiness of seeing the school bus I once travelled in, the crunch of that dosa from that one hotel we have always been to. These are all small bits of a mosaic of home. It is all the small memories and the big buildings in the cozy corner of my heart, full of nostalgia.

This time, when I travelled back home from university for my Deepavali holidays, this was something I realized and chanced upon as a note:

I read somewhere that airports are these places where time doesn’t really exist — liminal spaces suspended between the present and the future. Nobody really cares whether it’s morning, evening, or night. Someone might be eating breakfast at midnight, while another buys a drink early in the morning. The rhythm of time itself fades away because, in an airport, it doesn’t really matter; you only look forward to the place you are reaching and not really to where you are. Everyone moves without the pre-constructed notions of what needs to be done at certain hours because the emotional anchors of “here” and “now” are no more.

I think the same goes for a train, or a plane, or any mode of transport that takes you home. They too are these in-between places. You’re not really at home, but you’re not quite somewhere else either. The people around you aren’t from where you’re headed, nor are they from where you came. It’s as if everyone shares a moment of quiet in-betweenness — a space where longing overlaps, just like how time blurs in airports.

My Town, My Story

I live in this city called Hassan, a small, cozy town nestled in the western coast of India in the state of Karnataka. Every year we have a month-long festivity in my town in a temple called Hasanamba Temple, where devotees from all over Karnataka come to get the blessings of Devi, whose darshan is open only for a few days in this time of the year during Deepavali (Diwali). Every time this festival comes about, the city gets dressed up with all these lights, colorful LED screens, the circles and squares are all lit up.

And believe me, there is no bigger pleasure for me than arriving in the middle of the night back to this place I have called my home for about the last decade. It almost feels like this homecoming of epic proportions (call me crazy, but at times I feel the decorations are all for me to be back home, haha).

The bookstore from which I have bought almost every book since I was a kid still feels like a personal space that I share ownership of, at least spiritually, on a level of how the place means to me. If you are not from a big town, you know how good it is to visit the only bookshop in your town, and that place has so many memories locked in it.

I particularly recall that one time all the kids of our class got together in grade six to gift our class teacher and English teacher books by pooling in money. I still quite clearly remember that we had gifted Helen Keller’s Autobiography and also Gandhiji’s My Experiments with Truth to her because she had told us that she loved reading biographies. I never got to know if she read that book but that was the first time I had ever gifted something to a teacher because she meant so much to all of us. I really wish everybody had great English teachers like that.

Sometimes I feel this strange discomfort while writing about my own city — about Hassan, about a life I’ve lived and seen so closely. It’s not because I don’t love it, but because there’s this quiet inferiority complex that seems to have been stitched into my mind that our streets, our festivals, our way of life somehow don’t sound as beautiful or “literary” as the cobbled lanes of London or the glowing squares of New York.

We’ve all read about those places so often, seen them romanticized in movies and books, that they feel almost sacred in the imagination. But when it comes to describing our own towns, our own people, it suddenly feels like we’re not allowed to find that same beauty in a third world country. And maybe that’s the saddest part, that we were taught to admire what’s foreign before we ever learned to love what’s ours.

Finding Home

As Indians, most of us spend a significant amount of our lives in rented houses before our parents built their own. And every time we moved out of a rented place, we do not just leave behind a home; we leave behind a set of neighbors we developed bonds with, we leave behind that grocery store we went to for almost everything last minute, we leave behind the streets we walked in. Each of those places was not just a home, it was a shared, lived experience of several people who bonded together in a society that felt like home.

There is such a beautiful charm in finding home and an abode in every place, right? I guess it is just a human longing to feel safe, to call some people, some place, ours. And maybe that is why I wonder and dwell in the beautiful thought of how the people who have been here before us loved here, may it be a place, a monument or an old house.

As I step out of my home for a chapter of my life that I will have to craft on my own, there is a deeper, lingering feeling in my mind. As I become responsible as an adult, there is a growing desire that tells me that it’s time for me to look forward to building something that’s mine.

And this is a liminal space in thought about how my home is not mine anymore. Not in the sense that I am not welcome back home, but in the idea that the place we called home was the lived achievement of our parents, the care they provided to us in whatever strength they could. But now it’s time for us to grow beyond and care for them and build what is ours, distinctly away from what was theirs.

The Familiarity of Home

Home sweet home.

Home is where we all seek peace, happiness, and fulfillment, and perhaps that’s true of the houses we have lived in. Ever since I stepped out of my home into hostels, chasing dreams I could not yet understand, I have had the privilege of meeting people of great strength and indomitable character. From each of them, I have learned something different, a fragment of life, a glimmer of their story and ideals, and slowly, every place I turned to for comfort became a home, a small piece of what I call mine.

A place where I was understood, where I was seen for who I truly was. For them, my story, what I had to say, carried weight because they understood the burdens my soul bore. And that is why I have found people who feel like home, even when “home” is far away — people I can call mine, not by blood but by bond.

The Weight of Letting Go

There’s another dimension to this idea of home that I’ve only begun to understand recently. My ancestral home — the one my grandfather built, the one whose walls still carry the faint scent of his perfume, the warmth of his presence — is now being considered for sale. And for the first time, I truly understood what it means to let go of a piece of your past.

It’s strange how adulthood slowly demands this kind of detachment beyond the emotional connection we share with places. The decision sounds practical enough because I’m just a kid, and my opinions don’t really hold weight — it was never “mine” to begin with. I hear people say, “It’s just a property,” and others say, “It’s better to sell than to let it crumble.” But I can’t help but wonder: is a place really worth only what someone is willing to pay for it?

Because how do you assign a price to the echo of laughter in the courtyard, or the corner where your grandfather read his newspaper every morning, or the plants that were lovingly planted by his hands? There’s no market value for that. These aren’t just walls and tiles — they are repositories of the people who once lived, loved, and dreamt within them. From my grandfather’s generation slowly building a life in it, to my parents growing up there, to the phase of life where I grew up in it — it’s a lived museum of love and care that none can replicate.

And yet, we all eventually face that day — the day when sentiment must bow before practicality. Maybe this is what growing up truly is: learning to live with the quiet ache of selling pieces of your memory while convincing yourself it’s for the best. Or maybe if I were the adult, I would have found a way around it. But I understand that it’s never easy, even for the people who are doing it. I also kind of get it — it’s easier to fantasize about what we would have done if we were in someone else’s shoes than to actually be there.

What Remains After We Leave

In the end, as Irrfan Khan once said, “Life becomes an act of letting go — people, places, and properties.” What we held dear once might not stay ours, or we were mistaken to consider anything ours in the first place. And just like that, I would like to leave you with beautiful lines from this short film I saw on YouTube, Chaar Phool Hai Aur Duniya:

“Kahi cheeze toh aisi hai, bees saal ke baad yaad aa jaati hai, par us samay yaad aati hai jis samay yaad nahi aana chahiye, aur jis samay jo cheezein yaad aani chahiye, wo uss samay yaad nahi aati.”

And that, I think, beautifully summarizes the feeling and the idea of memory and home…

With Love,

Aryan!

#SpreadingSmiles :)

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