Home is where?

Your parents have moved to a place where it’s always summer, even during winter. Three days after you go there you find yourself sipping Irani chai at a sidewalk café. Everything seemed unsettling- the warm sunset and the taste of tea, the sound of unfamiliar voices and the sight of burkha clad women. Its 39 degrees and this is their home now.

You like the house and the city. You've been there before, for holidays. Your maternal grandmother once lived in the same city. The house sits on a formidable hillock with a view of seven ancient tombs that everyone in the city knows about. You know it too, now, but cannot attach any significance to it. To you, it feels like something cool trapped in something really humid. You have to wear sunscreen and carry an umbrella, always. You used to stay in houses like these, houses with sparrows sitting on windowsills, houses with beautiful views. You stayed there for a week, maybe two, and then you’d return to the pavement, and the subways of your valley. You’ll return to all of that again, but your parents will stay behind this time. This is their home now. Or is it yours too?

And how can that be? Have you and your best friend have never left your fingerprints on those tiles, and you've never hidden a letter in your pillowcase, and you've never scribbled on the doors, played in the driveway with your little brother? Have you moved that lawn with your dad?
Have you woken up in the middle of the night for a snack after having spent an entire day on the sofa reading a book? Have you sneaked out of the window? You don’t have to sneak out now, you can go as and when you please. You’re a guest now. This isn't your home, but it is theirs.

At five in the evening venture out to look for familiar places in an unfamiliar, strange city. Look at people but take that smile back because you realize you don’t know any of them. Mourn all of the times you flew down here to visit your grandparents; you played cricket on the streets, made new friends and told them that you love this place. Remember all the times you carelessly uttered that you’d like to live here one day and begin to regret it all at once.

Soon, when night with its inky curtain drops down blotting out the sun, tell yourself that it looks majestic. Wonder if you’ll ever call this ‘home’. “Stars are shinier and mostly white where I live”, you think. “Where is my home now”, you ask yourself? You wonder. You gulp down that tea and go ‘home’.