at home

 

“It is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home” – Theodor Adorno

“He smiled, "Why, you will go home and then you will find that home is not home anymore. Then you will really be in trouble. As long as you stay here, you can always think: One day I will go home." He played with my thumb and grinned.

"Beautiful logic," I said. "You mean I have a home to go to as long as I don't go there?"”– Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin

These lines have little to do with each other. They approach the idea of home from very different contexts. Adorno is demanding at interrogation of the comfort and security of having one’s own home, and how it comes at the expense of the privation of many others. In Giovanni’s room, the idea of a home that exists only as long you do not go there is expressed with respect to someone who has been living on the wrong side of the Atlantic for long enough that any ‘home’ he returns to will not be what he left. He remains a perpetual outsider in France and will return to America having lost the ability to call it home.

My father left Kerala over thirty years ago. Having spent his formative years in the state and taken pains to stay connected to his roots all this while, he remains ‘of Kerala’ even in 2025. I still think that when he does return, he will return to a home that is not really his. However, unlike Baldwin’s protagonist, it will remain his home even after he returns. My sisters and I grew up away from this ‘home’. In 2010, when we had a housewarming for the house my parents had built in Kerala, we had a home in a country we had never lived in, and would not for another decade. I cannot internalize how that country, that village, and that real and tangible piece of immovable property is something I must call home. The characters I refer to above lose their ‘home’ because they have removed themselves from it at a real point in history. My home is fiction; it is constructed. It is a stone’s throw away from where my father went to school, and plane ticket and visa barriers away from where I did. Neighbours and relatives know Mujib’s son; they have seen me posted on his Facebook. In a sense significantly more superficial than Adorno meant, I am naturally not at home in my home.

We have each chosen to cope with in wildly different ways. I try to run away. A undergraduate degree in the state farthest from Kerala, a master degree in another continent, and repeated attempts since to remove myself from these ‘roots’. One sister who has embraced this country like they have never known anything else. Another who, as she comes of age, also angles to make a home of her own elsewhere. Our stories are not unique, and in a world where displacement is mostly involuntary, hardly tragic. I know, at least, where to point fingers for being raised as part of a generation that do not have a place to be ‘from’. My little trick to “where are you from?” is to start the response with “my parents are from…” and hope it conveys that I still feel the Arabian Sea separating me from ‘home.’