Image credit – pixabay.com

I really don’t know what it really feels like. The feeling of having a home. It is different from having a roof over your head that is not your own but someone else’s. Living like guests, visiting for a few days before moving out again back to somewhere else. It’s a foreign feeling for me - of living in a place I can call my own. Never has it ever happened. Always has been like this as far as I remember. I’d have to take a sip of whiskey from my cup if I were to play the game “Never Have I Ever”.

Never have I ever owned a home that was my own. I take a sip from my plastic cup. The whiskey burns my throat. I always have lived in rented houses as far as I can remember. The game goes on, just like that. Never have I ever had my own bedroom. I take a sip. I used to sleep in the living room, I tell them. Only my parents got their own bedroom. The game goes on. Just like that.

Summer time. While my friends would be busy packing their stuff to go to their grandma’s place, I’d be busy packing my stuff and then lending a hand to pack the other stuff in the house in order to make sure nothing was left behind, checking everything twice before taping the boxes in order to move out. This is when we shifted from one house to the other. The TV would be in the box carefully placed away from everything else and so were my books and other things along with mom’s kitchen stuff and dad’s work stuff, carefully put inside these huge boxes, fastened with tape, piled up and put in a corner. The house would feel naked without all our things inside it. Stark open to our familiar gazes with nothing to shield itself from. It was like a rule. Always. This unwritten rule - whenever summer came, we’d move to a different place. A different neighbourhood. A different house. A different space.

I never once had what one might call a “permanent address”. It always changed after every two years. Same town, same school, same friends but a different address. And then at some point we began to move to different cities. Just like that. Never have I ever been born and raised in a single town or city. There I go again. I don’t need to look around to see who has taken a sip because no one has. It’s just me. I take a sip. I’m almost finished. I ask for a refill and the game continues.

The new place never felt like ‘home’ to me. Ever. It was always a ‘house’. Can we meet at my house? See you tomorrow at my house, I remember saying to my friends, knowing they wouldn’t notice the slight change in reference. I knew they’d never understand the difference. Home is where the heart is, they say. I couldn’t say that for myself. By that time, I’d given up having feelings for something I knew I was eventually going to abandon. And I guess I started doing the same with people, though not with any particular intention to hurt them. It just happened. It was something I had to do in order to be able to move on. Leaving everything behind every single time is tough, believe me, I’ve lived so many lives that I’ve lost count. I remember that the moment I used to feel comfortable, the moment I would begin to love the place and everything about it, everything around it, it’d be time for us to leave. To pack our stuff and move again to another place, another neighbourhood, another city.

But you get to stay at so many different places and meet new people, someone would always point out. The perks of our constant moving. And I don’t blame them. They said that at times it got boring to live in the same house for years. I think I understand what they wanted to say. They were not trying to console me in any way because they couldn’t see my plight. How could they? No one did. It’s fun, they used to say, to always keep moving. But I know they would never know the things that I’d gone through. To me it almost felt like betrayal every time I left a place and moved somewhere else. One might say it wasn’t betrayal. One might say it wasn’t abandonment. But to me, it always was. It always felt like abandonment even though the thing I’d always abandoned was a mere establishment of bricks and mortar.

Now it is my turn to ask them. I think for a moment. Never have I ever been abandoned by a parent. I hear gasps, though I’m not sure if they’re real or is it just the alcohol. I look up and look around to find all eyes locked on me. Nobody is moving or giggling anymore as if the alcohol has failed to do its trick. I can sense the air changing. I know I’ve crossed the line. I wasn’t supposed to say this. This is a different memory. Of abandonment of a different kind involving real people and not brick and mortar. I know what I need to do and so I take a huge gulp emptying my plastic cup as I get up. I’m done for the night, I tell them. Carry on without me, I say as I begin to leave. The night has grown cold. The fire is about to die but I know they will make another one. The night is still young.

As I walk back, soon the laughter starts coming back to life. I can listen to their distant murmur knowing they might be talking about me. The game will carry on for the rest of the night, I know that, without me. It should. Never have I ever, and then, if you have, you take a sip. Just like that.

*

I like to travel at night and always prefer taking the night bus even though I know how cumbersome it can become. My travel cuts between cities and towns and at times, villages. Places I’ve become familiar with passing time. Crossing each place in the dark of the night is what I always look forward to. I find it beautiful to see everything in deep slumber - silent and motionless. Everything is surrounded by this welcoming darkness of the night. This quietude that I get to witness is what I long for. And that is why, I never sleep throughout my journey. Not even a wink. Not because I worry about my luggage being stolen. It is because I like to look out of the window, as the bus journeys towards its destination cutting through the darkness, and look at the silhouettes of the passing homes. It always gives me this unknown yet immense feeling of joy and satisfaction, I don’t know why, to just sit, my head usually resting against the glass, and stare at the passing houses - home for the people living inside them, house for me since I don’t live there.

I always imagine the kind of lives the people inside these houses must be living. I make up stories and it changes from house to house, like chapters in a book. And as I make up these tales of fancy, I try to bring out this foreign feeling of owning a home of my own, and try to make my own story - of having my own room in some house that I see passing, thinking what would I be doing at this time of the night. I check the time and then go on to think about the numerous possibilities. And in that moment, for a split second, I get to experience that foreign feeling as I close my eyes and let that feeling takeover my entire body. And in the next moment, I come back to reality - the familiar sound of the engine, the wind coming through the open window. The only residue that stays for a while is that unknown feeling which soon starts getting fainter and fainter until it is completely gone. Just like a passing home.

I know all this is in my head. I am aware that I lack something that the others have - a home. A place of their own. And yes, there are many like me out there but thinking about them doesn’t comfort me. And so, I don’t think about such things even though I know it is not fair. It doesn’t bring that warmth and welcoming feeling that this elaborate fiction that I like to cling to whenever I see a house passing by the window brings me.

At least for now I don’t want to give up playing this game. But I hope I don’t have to play it all my life.

*

Over the years, as I’ve travelled to different places, I’ve met people just like me. People who’ve lived in other people’s homes for almost all their lives. Somehow, I immediately sense around them this aura of not being connected to something firm. Like a kite flying in the endless blue sky. They seem, just like me, untethered, like having no roots to one singular place. They don’t belong anywhere or among a set of people. They have, like me and my family, travelled to different places as if out of some obligation they cannot explain. They never were told why they did what they did - changing homes like changing socks. And whenever I meet such people, I take the initiative to introduce myself. It is the standard drill. And that is how I’ve been making friends lately. Finding untethered souls like myself and then sharing things that we have in common, talking about the places we’ve lived, things we’ve seen. But I guess, that is exactly how you make friends, no matter if they’ve lived in their own house or someone else’s.

But there is something different about people like me. Those who’ve never had a personal space they could grow up in. It was always someone else’s they found themselves in while growing up. It is our version of a hand-me-down. But rest assured, we’ve seen things many haven’t. Visited places many won’t. Met people from different worlds. And then, with a heavy heart, abandoned everything only to do it all over again.

An obligation we cannot explain.