By Ritu Kamra Kumar

Standing in the twilight of life, memories crowd upon us a like tide, of the home with wooden beam ceiling, rough stone floor and their green fences, where we stayed together, embracing one another in all the weathers. Yes, the home was in Nilokheri, a nondescript place in Haryana, rented on a princely sum where my father was a professor in the Government Polytechnic and my mother, a headmistress in school. But my story is not about ‘house’ but ‘home’ where we were at home. Three sides of a triangle we sisters were, always on an adventurous spree. Now I feel, how time flies without decree! Then from Nilokheri, we shifted to Ambala. In Ambala, we moved from our rented house to another, till we had our own home, an emblem of our identity. Moving from one house to another was always a miserable affair.

Then I got married and travelled back and forth between parental home and marital home which is always a wrench in a woman’s life. So gradually definition of home got expanded. ‘In-laws home’, ‘my home’ and then ‘our home’ in Yamuna Nagar. I thought finally, I have arrived at a place where I’ll rest as long as I live. It was ‘our home’. But how wrong I was! Because, soon, my son went for higher studies, then to join his job in another city. The definition of home expanded beyond my city and I wanted to be everywhere soon.

They say home is where the heart is – but now I realise my heart is in not in one place. What does home mean for me now? Is home the place in Nilokheri where I was born? Is it Ambala where I studied and spaces teemed with our heartfelt whoops, fun and frolic? Is it Yamuna Nagar where I have settled peacefully? Is it Delhi where my son lives? Is it where I am happiest or where I am most emotionally connected? Does home means being with people whom I love most, can depend on most?

Now I have an epiphany ‘home’ that keeps on expanding and is a comprehensive term to include all we love and care for. We leave bits of our hearts with all those we touch with love and passion. So being ‘at home’ is more a metaphor than a physical construct. Home is where you feel safe, secure, happy in harmony with the ambience and dear ones with no fear of rejection or being judged. So you can feel ‘at home’ or ‘homeless’ irrespective of where you are physically. Being at home is being connected to the place and people, aura and audacity, love and laughter – i.e. to be mindful. Maya Angelou rightly said, ‘The ache for a home lives in all of us, the safer place where we can go as we are and not to be questioned.”

That is why I am at home when I am in my college where I have been teaching since 1987, just as a painter is at home with brush in hand, or a writer with pen and pad. Parents are at home with their children residing in foreign lands. The difference between a ‘house’ and ‘home’ can be best explained by an anecdote my father once told me. He said when they came to India from Pakistan after partition, they did not have a place to call home but as a kid whenever someone sympathised with them ‘for not having home’ he used to reply naively “We just don’t have a house to put it into!” Well, said Rober Frost “Home is the place where when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”