Home is the place you come for safety

Danger lies outside; home is the place you come for safety. This quote is mine, if quote it is. Home for me began with just two other humans: Ram and Kamala, my parents. Home was were they lived as the 'where' changed more often than I would have liked. And we each 'home' came new people: the staff at home, the friends at school but R and K remained as constant as the North star. So no matter what the hurt as hurts also change as you grow and assume new personas, home and therefore safety was were my parents were. Prague, Peking, Paris,  Rabat, Saigon, Algiers, Ankara and finally Delhi where they built a home that belonged to us. Nomadic days were over, we had come home to safety. And when Kamala left, Ram took on both the roles and I knew I could run to him and feel safe. Then he too left and call it Fate for want of a better word, I had to close my home and move to Paris. But this time Paris was never home as 'they' were not with me so I had many trips back to the empty house I still call home. I think it was when I was in Paris in the throes of an everlasting mourning period that I decided that once we were back in India, I would set roots and never move again.

Today I feel the need to write these words because the pressure on me to 'take' a holiday is mounting and becoming past bearing. My explanations seem weak and tenuous. The fear of flying excuse does not hold ground anymore. And frankly there are times when even I ask myself why I have this terrifying phobia of leaving home. It was time that I analysed the situation and hence this post.

It is many a times that an off the cuff remark triggers a ripple effect in your mind and that is what happened when I was once again trying to slide out of the very warm invitation to visit Paris from two charming friends. I do not know why but I found myself saying: I cannot put why whole life in a suitcase again! And that was it, not the fear of flying or any shallow excuse, my fear was to have to leave home and never find it again!

Earlier it was easy to fly off the coop for a while as home was lovingly kept warm by Pa and Ma, but now leaving it, even for a short time, could bring about its annihilation. Home is no more the building in any part of the planet. It is the empty shell that has taken me years to make home again, in spite of the fact that my parents are no more there to hug me and make everything all right.

Coming back from Paris for good was traumatic to say the least. The house felt empty and desolate. For a while I would not allow anyone to move a thing even an inch as I wanted to keep everything as it was when 'they' were there. I wandered in the house lost and disconsolate trying to make them come alive by some miracle. I can never thank my best friend who one day told me to stop making the house into a museum in the memory of my parents but to make it mine. Thank God better sense prevailed, - it rarely does - and I took her advise and remodelled the house in a radical way: to give you and example Ma's bedroom become the kitchen and I carved out my hobbit hole out of the drawing room assigning myself the space Papa use to spend most time in. Things were better, but it was still not home. Home needed some permanence, some continued presence and surreptitiously and insidiously the fact that it could only remain home if I never left it till my last breath. So here you are this is why any offer, however loving, generous and heartfelt cannot be accepted as the price to pay may be fatal.

You are right in wondering what was the suitcase all about as it seems I have explained it all. Not quite because it is the suitcase that made it home. The suitcase I talk about is a imaginary one. It is actually the sum of everything that has been part of my life from April 4th 1952 and is scattered all over the house: from the ugly ceramic cat I created when I was 4, to the painting of an eminent artist; from the pictures that trace my life from babyhood to grand motherhood; from Papa's beautifully bound law books dating from the Xviii century onwards that are carefully dusted to the book I bough yesterday! Little objects and bigger ones, each choking with memories that only live in my head but that are revived each time my eyes settle on one or the other. You may say and rightly say why all the fuss, you will become back and still find everything there. You are wrong. You see I cannot be me without each and every of these things and cannot pack them in a suitcase.

I hope my loved ones would read these lines and understand what I mean.