Lockdown Diaries: Home by Ruth Vanita
Home is the place one feels driven to return to when the sky is falling
Where is home? Teaching and living most of the year in Montana, but rushing back to India as soon as summer and winter vacations begin, I have thought about this often, especially on those long flights to and fro.
Is home where you have a house? What if you have two, in two places? Home is where the heart is, goes the saying. But that’s too easy. What if the heart is broken in two? Is home where your family is or where most of your friends are? My immediate family is in America and travels with me to and from India but almost all my close friends are in India, though with time several have died or disappeared.
Sometimes I’ve thought that home is where your dreams are set, as your mother tongue is not the language you think in but the language you dream in. In dreams you are locked down and cannot escape at will, just as this lockdown itself seems like a collective nightmare from which we can’t wake up. All of my dreams over the years have been set in India, until this March, when I was in Gurgaon and had my first dream set in Montana. Daytime, but the sky was dark, as I walked across campus, clutching books, papers, and a white-upholstered armchair. A roaring wind blew me off the ground and bore me towards the looming black mountain. “Destiny, unstoppable as death.”
Is home the place where you want to die? My mother, who lived in the US with us for the last six years of her life, repeatedly told me that she wanted to die in India. As it happened, this wish of hers was fulfilled. Now, I share her desire.
Is home where one writes most easily? In the US, I find academic writing easier because of the better-organized library systems, but over the years, I have found that poetry and other non-academic writing flows more easily in India. Under lockdown, doing both kinds of writing, I feel distracted and uneasy with academic work but somehow more in touch with the less fathomable sources of poetry.
Is home the place where you would rather be during a crisis? Having been under lockdown in Gurgaon, and now being under lockdown in Montana, where we had to come because of family members’ health conditions that make them more susceptible, I dwell on this quandary, “coming to many ways in the wanderings of thought.”
In Montana, normal life is socially distanced. There are about five people to every square mile of land, and rarely does anyone come to the door. I often write alone at home, and the sounds I mostly hear are those of machines – dishwasher, laundry machine, the heat clicking on and off.
In Gurgaon, under lockdown, I missed the many people, friends, workers, vendors, whose comings and goings punctuated my writing. In either place, I can talk to my friends and family on the phone – why should it matter whether they are five miles away or five thousand miles away? But, oddly, it does.
Now that contact with the outside world is largely limited to observing the non-human world, in Montana I can step into the dry garden, or yard, as Americans call it, and see more of that world – a small stream, a hillside, and mountains beyond. But I miss the little balcony from which I saw trees whose names I know, awaited the koyal, and heard the peacock in the morning and the tithiri at night, whose hysterical cry reminded me that we can’t control everything – tithiri se aasman thama jayega? (Can the tithiri hold up the sky?).
Home is the place one feels driven to return to when the sky is falling. Though many migrant workers decided to go home for financial reasons, there were other reasons too. Better confront the crisis with one’s own people in one’s own village. This feeling was not confined to the poor. Waiting at the airport, Americans broke into applause when the pilots appeared. “Get us home,” someone shouted. Most of the Indian Americans stayed silent, perhaps feeling they were being wrenched away from home.
When we reached Montana, numerous messages from American friends said, “Welcome home,” while Indian friends wrote, “Good you’ve reached home.” These sentiments seemed ironic to me. The idea that my home is in Montana is based on the common-sense belief that home is where you spend more of your time.
But, especially today, when so many millions belong to more than one place, home is more than the modern idea of citizenship. The ancient Greeks had it right, I think. The word “nostalgia” comes from the Greek nostos or home, and algos or pain. Home is the place you ache for, beyond reason. And, as Homer’s Odysseus said, “Where shall a man find sweetness to surpass his own home…? Not in far lands, though he build a house of gold.”
Ruth Vanita is a professor at the University of Montana. She co-founded Manushi, India’s first nationwide feminist magazine. Her books include Love’s Rite: Same Sex Marriage in India and the West and Dancing With the Nation; Courtesans in Bombay Cinema. Her next book is Memory of Light from Penguin India.