In a piece I intend to write of home, I increasingly remain baffled by my searing desire to write about homelessness. I am at home, writing about home, yet I seem to dwell on the seeming homelessness of my self. Home always means an address, a dwelling place that connects anyone to a geography of belonging. Known landscapes, streets, smells, sights, sounds, and people. It is the people who always make one dwell, stay on. Live with a place.
My earliest memories transpire around a 6×10 room. The room of my adolescence and early youth; the room which taught me to leave and stay. Live and dwell. That room. It was the mezzanine of my father’s house in Kolkata. It was a storage room when I moved in and claimed it. Windows never opened, stacks of old magazines, comic books that had lost their shiny covers, but carried gossamer memories of kids who had once fought over them, notebooks with Mom’s notes from her college lectures, picture books inherited from grandmothers, books in all the languages we spoke in at home—English and Bengali. It was dusty but had the potential to house me, if I made peace with the lack of space it had. And, so I began digging out for space.
A makeshift box holding old books served as my chair, a small table lamp for light, and a rickety table of my paternal grandfather sealed my entry into the room, gradually. It was bare of ceiling fans, light fixtures; it held up the glories of my parents’ past lives to me to discover every day and purge out. It had their books, their notes; the redundancy of their past lives that echoed from each corner of that room. I started to clear space, encroaching the storage area. I started populating the walls with stickers, pictures torn off old calendars, popular film magazines, and tabloids. Posters, stamps, images, and quotes were glued on; fans, light fixtures, a stereo system, bookshelves, and a small bed later, my room got a character just like its occupant. I was clearing out the space my parents had filled in with their past lives, before me, without me. I was making space for me. My mom’s notebooks were eventually catalogued and put away in the attic, dad’s memorabilia found a shelf, magazines and newspapers were disposed off by the kilogram—taking off in the large dirty white cloth bags of newspaper walas and magazine collectors. I was claiming space and trying to position the room as mine. Is that how occupations began? Is that how one generation’s past piles up in a corner of another’s present?
I was unsure at the time. I did not venture yet to think back and reflect on my actions. I was more intent on claiming and re-owning a space. A 6×10 room.
A good part of the adolescent self was spent dreaming, plotting, and remaking the walls of the room. I opened up the windows, dusted out the cobwebs, and spent time inhabiting and claiming the room’s energy as it melded into mine. Was that my home? I had only displaced some memories and created others in its place. Was it then like a quilt? Lined up with the stories of people who shared the 4-walls of the 6×10? With pages of poetry, fiction, scrapbooks, and journals later, I entered into early adulthood. In that same room, my friends came up to meet me: in search of an idea, in search of a goal, in pursuit of a mission to define my life with. In that room, I cried my first heartbreak, felt the first crush, and housed my first secret—away from the rest of the house and its occupants. Disappointments, milestones, reality checks, heartaches, and heartbreaks, no matter what, that room was home to a world that failed to get what I was all about. I was homed in that room. It grew me.
But rooms and homes seldom remain. It did not for me. Perhaps, I had started to outgrow my 6×10 existence and started to dream out, dream bigger…perhaps.
So, with budding young adulthood, I was increasingly out of the room. I wrote my first job application, got my first job, and opened my first scholarship letter in that room. When I moved out, I dreamt about the room. The people featured too, but what appeared most were my stages of slow but steady occupancy of the room. It was my nesting place after a long, hard day. I was home there. When I came back from work, and later, when I moved out of town, the room became an internal part of the entire house. It was always “Her room” to the other members of my family when I occupied it most of the time. Later, when I started to come back to the room, after work, after my out of site job, it slowly became “The upstairs room.” I had moved out—of the room and out of the house too. Although, I unconsciously never left the room, I realized in the new change of term, that my leaving had a permanency about it. The room had accepted that I had left. And so had the people elsewhere about the house.
A few years later, I went overseas and started a new chapter of my life. The rooms I lived in never came to my dreams. They were part of a reality I was constructing by myself. I don’t quite recall the roomscape of that first living situation I moved into, in the US. Was the window to the left? How many steps to the room, right side of the house or left? Did it have imprints of its earlier occupants? My conscious memories do not let me recall the character of the rooms I moved into. Student housing, community housing, private 1-bedroom, I stayed in those addresses and those locations, only to find I had forgotten them the moment I started living in a new place. The temporariness of these rooms, those houses never bothered me, I had always thought of the original room, that little shack—that storage area converted into a living space, as my dwelling place.
That first time when I went back for a visit, the room did not stick out to me. Its character had changed with the person who currently inhabited it. Where were my images, posters, and calendars? My memories? Were my stamp collections and scrapbooks still there? I had been swiftly replaced. Unclaimed. A youth lived outside of digital archives, I found myself increasingly engulfed by the reality of not being there, not persisting in time. The room had purged me out of it. There were still dust and cobwebs though. I just wondered if these were the same cobwebs I had left behind? Or, were they from times generations past, occupants renting out these tiny webs, only to find others taking them over. With time. Were these the same homes for the tiny insects that never relocated?
The room simply stared back at me with a clinical precision that screamed, “upstairs room.” I had moved out. I could not feel me in the room and exited it, speechless. Was this the slow dawning and absorbing truth that things pass on? Was it the internalization that I had moved on from the room and that it was the dwelling of someone else now? Was I incapable of feeling that the room had also grown out of me? I don’t know. Years later, in my study in a different room, in a different place, on a street I have walked through everyday, I still feel the transcience of a dwelling.
For people who move out, for people who move on, is there a dwelling ever? I can’t stop feeling homeless every time I step into the room I live in now; and, when I go back to a room left behind in time and distance, I realize how the room stopped responding to me which once felt like I breathed in it… 20 years on, I move from one room to the next, in search of a dwelling, a nesting, and fall back thinking of that first home that never stopped being mine but never stayed mine.
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