A Thousand Days
Sometime in December last year, Prem Panicker, one of my favourite writers, wrote a long, very personal article on the meaning of home and…
Sometime in December last year, Prem Panicker, one of my favourite writers, wrote a long, very personal article on the meaning of home and what forms it. Like with most of his written work, the story struck deep, mostly because he seems to have wrestled with a question that I have too. Around last week, it felt like the right time to attempt an addressal.
You rarely get past a first conversation without being asked where you are from. The answer has never come easy to me, because the question isn’t easy.
Cultural heritage is perceivably an important part of one’s identity. It may not always define a person, but the framework is born out of generations of behavioural patterns. If you’re from Calcutta, you must like the arts and sports, and have sweets after every meal. If you’re from Delhi, you live life on the fast lane; you’re all about Punjabi music, liquor and parties, most times all three together.
On the surface level, “Where are you from?” looks like a question fending for your birthplace. For some, it coincides with their spiritual home, so the answer comes naturally. It’s where they take their first steps, break their first tooth, make their first friend and attend their first school.
For some others, it can range from a collection of alphabets on your birth certificate to a destination for your half-yearly trips to connect with your roots. The answer can take a while to come.
***
I don’t know how I think about Calcutta. I spent the inconsequential entirety of my first four and a half years of existence there. Admittedly, there are things about the city I wish I could bottle up and carry with me wherever I go, most of which directly links to food, arts and sports.
But all of them are portable entities at their core. You can experience Bengali food or fandom for art and sport without having anything to do with the city.
My trips to North Calcutta or Eden Gardens don’t make me a Bengali, neither does my love for music and journalism. The familiarity of native language, too, has little impact on me outside of a daily phone call home, or navigating through life when I’m there.
Over time, I have come to realise that my family is the only thread that ties me to Calcutta. From the sidelines, I have admired their immense pride in Bengali heritage. My folks don’t even call the city Calcutta; it has always been Kolkata. They don’t hesitate when asked where they are from.
But then, they didn’t move to Delhi, a city different in every single way, when they were four.
***
I know how I think about Delhi. I spent a substantial twenty one formative years drifting between different parts of the National Capital Region, which also envelops Noida, Gurgaon and Ghaziabad.
I grew up in Delhi. It’s where I went through my schooling and under-graduate college. I cut my teeth on the music scene gigging at Connaught Place pubs, attended and played my first cricket and football matches somewhere between Noida Stadium and the Ferozeshah Kotla. It is the city of my firsts. On some carefree days, I have roamed the streets of Gurgaon at 3am on misty winter nights, or scampered towards Shawarma stalls after sweating out a game of football under the peak summer sun.
It is where my closest set of friends still live, and thus, a sizeable part of what would constitute a home.
***
In 2016, I moved to Chennai.
Delhi is distant from Chennai and the rest of South India, in a way that a three-hour flight will never fully explain. You feel and smell the distance everywhere you look. The cultural education you receive in Delhi or Northern India drills that distance into you like a woodpecker on a tree.
If you’re from Chennai, you must be used to sweating your entire bodyweight out everyday, you probably eat sub-standard food, and you wish you were from Bangalore.
You’re subliminally taught that Chennai is stuck in a tropical no man’s land, without the pace of Bangalore or the aesthetics of Kerala. The concerned “how long can you last there?” messages from friends and family outnumbered the “best of luck”s, but I was fortunate to be flying out with a set of people who too were looking forward to get used to a new, unexplored territory, outside our carefully conditioned comfort zones.
When describing a place, we often talk about its topography, almost never about its people. But don’t people make or break a place? Would you enjoy Paris if everyone shoved you around? Conversely, wouldn’t you find peace in a torn down village in some deep corner of the country, if the people there were warm and welcoming?
Chennai has terrific food and amazing beaches, a rare and deep love for art, but most importantly, it is home to some of the nicest and kindest people I’ve had the fortune to come across.
Not for a moment do I mean to say that every second person in Delhi or Calcutta runs around with a machete in their pockets, but in a divided country during divisive times, I have my doubts if they’ll be as amazingly hospitable to a group of people from the opposite end of the Indian cultural spectrum within five minutes of acquaintance.
Last week, it felt like the right time to address a question around home because I had just completed three years in Chennai, and my love for everything about it has confounded even those who have spent their entire lives here.
While it may not be the spontaneous answer to this question that I have been wrestling with, but Chennai has been a substantial part of my life, my home for more than a thousand days.