What does your ideal home look like?
I’ve written before about the question “where are you from?” and what it means to belong to a place.
This prompt from Jetpack felt like a familiar attempt to get writers to talk about housing, interior design, and fabulous locations.
For me, this prompt comes at a time when I am once again asking myself where do I belong to? I was born here, but do I belong here?
When I first came back to the States, I connected with the character of Mukundan Nair, who had returned to his native place in Kerala only to find:
“a world that has moved both too slow and too fast,” Jean Burke-Spraker, Where do you belong to?: Homecoming and belonging in The Better Man
As I reread old blog posts now, it feels like my writing has regressed. That my ability to weave a tapestry through words is diminished and dulled. That world no longer exists. That writer no longer exists.
I make my living in communications, and yet my writing now feels like it lacks the color it once did. When I posted my latest blog about why I blog, my friend Julia commented that,
“the world seemed so gray after India”
My thoughts on reading this comment this morning were, “Yes. Exactly.”
And not just because fashion outside South Asia can be stunningly monochromatic and literally quite gray. Those of us who took India and Indians into our hearts can still feel a deep loss of places and peoples to which we did not formally belong. In no small part because so many Indians welcomed us as if we did. Atithi devo bhava indeed.
In December 2019, following my divorce, I had decided to make 2020 my year of connection. Something, which even as much as I have moved in my life, I have always struggled to do.
Covid had other plans.
As Robert Burns once wrote:
But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!Robert Burns, To a Mouse, On turning her up in her Nest, with the Plough, November, 1785.