Home is where you are

home |hōm| noun.
1 the place where one lives permanently, esp. as a member of a family or household.
2 a place where something flourishes, is most typically found, or from which it originates.
3 adjective [attrib.] of or relating to the place where one lives.

Thursday, December 15, 8pm: New Delhi

The freshly baked paratha melts in my mouth, with just enough lachha — or clarified butter — to give the soft, warm dough a kick of flavor. I wave the flies away at this streetside dhaba, check my watch, pay the bill. There’s a bite to the air tonight; men lighting small piles of crumbled newspaper below the curb kneel down and hold their hands out, palms facing the flames.

A wooden cart is laden with peanuts and popcorn; a bowl of incense burns in the middle, smoke dancing in a lantern’s glow. I pause before it, the seller reaches for a sheet of paper, starts twisting it into a cone to fill with nuts.

“No, no,” I apologize, telling him I’m just looking. I walk quicker, turn onto the main road of Pahar Ganj with its many shops and stalls still open for business.

After three days of walking these streets, bargaining up and down for Christmas presents, I now mark the way to my hotel not by street numbers, but by shops: the one selling gaudy sweaters for 200 rupees, “fixed price.” The one with the leather bags I can’t afford. The one with the cloth ones I can.

I’d been to Delhi before, but it isn’t until now, in December when winter has hit and blown through the city — clearing the air of its stench as though throwing open a window in a stuffy room — that this city has won me.

It isn’t until now that Delhi feels like home.

Friday, December 16, 8pm: London

On the platform of Surbiton station, a group from the local youth orchestra regales passersby with songs about Santa Claus and snowfalls. A Waterloo-bound train pulls up and I board, like I did so many times this past year when Surbiton was home. But now I’m only here for a night, and there’s a 50lb. backpack pressing into my shoulders.

“You look like you’ve just come back from Nepal,” a woman at my university says when I stop by to pick up my dissertation.

“I have,” I say with a rueful smile.

The train carries me to the flat of my good friend Micaela. She’s at the station’s gates when I arrive and we hug and laugh, so ready for a catch-up. It’s been a day of seeing people I love and haven’t seen for months, and this is no different. Micaela and I start walking up the street but at the corner, I suddenly stop, read the name of the restaurant in front of us twice, then a third time. Chennai Dosa.

“What is it?” she asks.

I tell her that Chennai is where I spent Diwali with an Indian family, and that dosas are one of my favorite south Indian dishes.

Returning to London, to Surbiton especially, for the first time since September has felt like I never left at all.

And yet a restaurant reminds me I most definitely have.

Saturday, December 17, 8pm: Virginia

My sister is refusing to speed. Carefully she steers the car away from Dulles, away from DC, down a series of interstates I’ve travelled before — but it’s been a little while and their route numbers sound like something I’d once memorized for an exam but have since forgotten. Outside Manassas, we pull into a Chickfila, that great inventor of its eponymous sauce we can never get enough of.

“Do you have any Chickfila sauce?” we ask one of the workers. When he hands us two, we say, “We’re gonna need a few more, please.”

Three hours later, I walk through the front door, surprise my parents who are expecting me home two days later, and re-enter the life of the family I’ve missed so much this year. But even as the air rings with excitement and ‘welcome homes’, I think — home is a curious word, isn’t it?

Because what happens as our definition of home expands? What if home can be many things? Maybe where you grew up, and where your family lives now or you live, and even where you spent three months, three weeks, or three days.

What if home is just exactly where we are?