My Home

Written By: Sumita Roy

What is a home? According to the Wikipedia, it is a permanent or a semi-permanent dwelling of an individual, family or household. For me, it is the accumulation of all the experiences I had within the time from laying the foundation bricks to a beautiful decade of residing in it.  

I was too young to understand the importance of having a home that I could call my own. But I still remember the first time my folks took me to a deserted field, stood me and my sister at two different points, and went to stand in another two, making an imaginary rectangle out of it, and finally, announcing that this is where our new home is to be built. At first I thought it is going to be a palace, with such a large area at our disposal, it could not have been anything else. Even when the place was being designed and constructed I imagined it with a lot of grandeur. But when I first entered the place with walls constructed around it, I felt so lost. I lost the dream of my beautiful palace. It was a mere one thousand square feet area around me. I was no more a princess.

I could not understand my father’s toiling and his pride for that structure, nor my mother’s financial worries. But one thing I remember clearly, my best sleep. I had it on the same night I entered this fully constructed house, and the following morning, when I saw the best smiles of my parents waking and greeting me with a ‘good morning’. It is almost a decade and a half old event, but somehow magically imprinted on the lane of my memory.

I cannot say I have had a very happy life then. Because the fact is no body actually has an ideal life full of only happiness, because if he has that, he will lose the importance of happiness. I was an early teenaged girl with problems of studies, exams and a complicated life. Understanding the demands of survival was becoming maddening to me. But when I finally acquired some sense within me, I saw a lot of time has already passed, and it was time to leave home to create a brighter future for myself. 

There is just one thing, no actually two things, I still have to figure out. Why did my heart clench and my eyes fill with water when I left home for the first time? And why do I still have the urge to run to it whenever I feel low?