A friend visiting her son in Toronto, Canada, captioned her photograph, clicked outside his house, as ‘ homecoming’. This set me thinking why ‘homecoming’ when for better part of the year she resides in her permanent home in New Delhi. Well to give her some leeway, I think, what she meant was feeling ‘at home’.

I too am in similar conundrum….a frequent hopper between my adaptive home in Calgary and the permanent brick and mortar abode in the national capital of India, New Delhi. For few days I miss the one left behind but within weeks I am ‘at home’. The sense of belonging takes over because as Jordan Abel (EMPTY SPACES ) writes ‘A room is not four walls, but the space in between them. The utility of a clay pot is what can be held inside of it’.

It is our relationship to our surroundings, land and objects, whether metamorphic or physical, that guides our closeness. Home is where your heart is and mine is where I am at the moment.

Gurgaon, India…..nothing changes.

Ten months on and we un-tie the threads we had knotted before leaving and start anew. For few days one does miss the streamlined workings of foreign lands but then home is also pollution, the crowds, the procrastinations, the ‘chalta-hai’ or ‘ does not matter’ attitude. I am ‘Caught between two worlds….the old and lived versus the new and experimental’ and like Pico Iyer try to ‘locate the common hearth of human experience’. We search for permanence forgetting “all things are temporary and will soon pass away. All suffering, say the Buddhists, arises from attachment.

To be continued…..