To all the homes I loved before

I got to Delhi airport last week and tapped on my cab app The first of frequently used destinations that appeared was saved as Home My throat caught Who knew booking an Uber could hurt That address ceased to be my home since my mother sold it and moved to Bombay last year For the first time in 35 years a trip to Delhi did not automatically mean going homeI stayed with my friend who lives close to my old home Itrsquos also a home for memdashwhen I left her mum stuffed my bag with kababs Yet I felt like I had a ghost limb Intimate streets predictable traffic but the sense of an incomplete journey as if I had just stopped on the way home which in my mind stood exactly as beforeFunnily I never really lived in that house When my parents moved there I had already begun to make my life in Bombay Yet because it was my parentsrsquo home subconsciously it seemed like if all else failed there would always be a place to ldquoreturnrdquo to a refuge When my father passed away the house stood in for his embrace for the sight of him squinting at a mirror as he trimmed his moustache in the balcony stocking the refrigerator with ice cream when my friends visited planting the bougainvillea Without the house to mark that time one must accept that one has travelled down the road of time without a loved one after all Returning is not an option We must be our own refugeAlso Read The surgical handI grew up living in many different houses thanks partly to my father being in the Air Force Each house had been occupied by some other family beforemdashwe walked into anotherrsquos oncehome and made it our own for the two or three years we lived in it Each leaving was a wrench undercut by romantic anticipation for the new place that awaited us Each new place started out feeling thrillingly exoticmdashnew flowers new flavours new words an Enid Blyton adventure in the makingmdashand ended feeling achingly familiar a lost beloved like homeI often think that this life of many homes formed my personalitymdashat home everywhere and yet never feeling like I belong anywhere adventurous gregarious yet aloof We lived in each home knowing we must go but acting as if wersquod be there forevermdashundoing some of what the last family had done to the place building familiar rituals of library memberships Sunday lunches new best friends standard haircut place I still only get my hair cut in Delhi In one house in Secunderabad my father painstakingly planted a circular lawn ringed by a flowerbed of pansies and built a rockery under the jacaranda tree I went back to see the house over 20 years later to find the garden wild and quite ignored by the current residents Then I noticed that some weeds had grown in a perfect circle tracing the circumference of that old round lawn So someone must have tended it as their own long after we left with the attention and love one gives to onersquos home Homes belong to everyone and no one used to the loving and leavingThat is why we may always be a little lonely but I guess home never isParomita Vohra is an awardwinning Mumbaibased filmmaker writer and curator working with fiction and nonfiction Reach her at paromitavohramiddaycom