At about 30, you’d think pangs of “home” and the uneasiness of uncertainty would all be gone when you move to a new city that you know nothing much about.
As it turned out in my case, it was true till the mild fever set in. Once you’re sick in a far-away place with no familiar friend or family around to soothe you with as little as assuring words, things don’t seem as bright and promising as they did before the sickness set in.
Just like any other city in a rapidly-emerging urban India, Hyderabad has long ceased to be a city and grown into this huge mess of a place, gobbling up what used to be small villages and towns and hills all around it. In some, it reminds me of Mumbai-Thane-Navi Mumbai as I passed through them over the course of a November day, watching skyscrapers being constructed almost everywhere.
The hostel I picked is smack in the middle of an entire area of other hostels for working men and women. To add to the milieu is a bunch of more hostels being constructed. Naturally, then, the air between 8am and 11pm holds this thick, uncomfortable suspension of construction dust that would probably kill the lungs in a year or so.
For a long time, “home” has remained ill-defined for me. When I miss “home”, I don’t necessarily mean my parents’ home or being around my parents. There was one period of time when I tried to find out what “home” really meant, and what that sinking emptiness I felt when I craved for something like a home despite not wanting to go back to Chennai.
After a decade, in a hostel in Gowlidoddy, I realize that home is really the sense of familiarity. Familiar surroundings, familiar people, familiar noises, familiar smell, familiar roads, familiar buses, familiar buildings, familiar messages from the few people you are in touch with. In a way, then, any place can become home if you live just long enough, going about your routine.
After a dose of paracetamol, the fever seems to have receded and the cold seems to be on its way out and this morning was once again bright and promising.