My childhood home(s)
The place that I most commonly identify as my home is the train commute between my current hometown Serampore and Howrah station. This is the response that I generally provide when I am asked, “Where is my home?” I have spent seven years of my life commuting between these railway stations and therefore I feel that the place I feel at home is when I am in transit. I have always been in transit. Between stations and airports. Serampore to Howrah.
Howrah to 8B. CCU to Charle de Gaule. CCU to Pittsburgh International Airport. CCU to Boston. Pittsburgh Downtown to New York Union Station.
As I sit to write down about my childhood home, I have been in transit even between my childhood homes. My ancestral home was in a place called Ashoknagar, where my paternal grandparents arrived a little before the partition of 1947. I have not had the opportunity to speak to any of my grandparents about their memories of partition. None in my family ever speaks about it. I let it be.
But what I do know is that one of my childhood homes in Ashoknagar where I spent the first fours of my childhood (including a year of schooling in a school where Bangla was the primary language of instruction) has partition memories stored in it. Architecturally the house was different. They were made with slabs and not bricks — which I have been told by Baba is very common in many of the houses in Ashoknagar. This was a strategy used to save money. I know partition memories live in that house architecturally.
I can feel the taste of the jamrul from the jamrul trees in the courtyard and listen to my cousins screaming, “ Ota out noye.” Occasionally I would join them for a game of cricket. I have fought my way to be allowed to play in the team and to be taken seriously. In some ways, my first voice of rebellion and protest has been shaped by the verandah of the house. I left Ashokenagar for my birthtown and maternal uncle’s place Serampore, when I was 4. Stayed with my maternal grandparents and ma only visited me sometimes.
Eyes were always on me but in fact, for the next three years of my life, I grew up independently. Listening to a lot of stories that Dida always narrated. Listening carefully, intentionally and with curiosity is how I would like to remember this place. Dida’s voice is how I remember this place. I did not have to rebel in this place. In Ma’s absence, I developed a sense of autonomy (This changed later because an astrologer told Ma that I would elope at the age of eighteen and she kept very strict eyes on me. Has not changed much)
I kept visiting Ashokenagar a few times in a year. My first childhood home that I only recognized through the fruity watery taste of the jamrul; my first site of resistance and the chilly wind that always embraced me gently during Durga Pujo. More than the built environment, my first childhood home is defined by these smells, sounds and touch of the wind. The place is ephemeral.
Back to Serampore. My childhood home. Did not have a room as such. Kept on moving between two rooms. A small space used as a kitchen and the lingering smell of kerosene from the stovetop. The contrast between the large space in Ashokenagar and honestly a very small space in the first home at Serampore. The duality of the immensity and the dinghy remains so fervently etched in my psyche even now that it flashes right in front of my eyes, every time I go house-searching in Pittsburgh.
I don’t even know why I am writing about these places today. I have moved between homes so much as a child and (perhaps) as another change awaits, I become reflective of the fact that I have never had that stability of a house. Home- I have always had. As I write this today, with a genocide unravelling, I am thinking that children do not even have the luxury of a house or a home in Gaza. May be, nostalgia and inserting this one sentence about Gaza are not the best writing moves to write about a deeply political subject today. But our sense of politics too starts somewhere and for me, the loss of home is what got me invested about Gaza when I first learnt about it during my high school. House and the home will remain a site of deep political engagement for me.
The houses lost, the homes abandoned, the houses bombed, the houses built and rebuilt only to be destroyed again, the tents burnt. Where is the home in Gaza? Will there ever be a home in Gaza?
