Gaurav Ojha
For most of my life, I’ve lived within the confines of my own small world, feeling safe and secure. There’s been little reason to worry in my limited surroundings. I haven’t traveled extensively, aside from the occasional holiday. As a result, I don’t really know what it feels like to be away from home for long stretches of time. However, for many of my expat friends, being away has become routine. Scattered across the globe, they live in various parts of the world. Despite this, as I browse through their blogs, web pages, and Facebook comments, I find them not just concerned, but often deeply preoccupied with Nepal—its political complexities and absurdities, emerging cultural and artistic trends, and the many social issues of the day. These are their thoughts of home from afar.
Often, while going through their social media statements, tweets and comments, my mind muses about that wonderful line by Wallace Stegner that home is a notion that only the homeless can fully appreciate and comprehend. As I reflect on them, I find myself in an awkward position. The thought that arises in my mind is whether my rootedness has made me utterly forget to appreciate my homeland. I tell my migrant friends that I too miss the genuine experience of being at home without them.
Whenever I think about home and its significance, Homer’s Odysseus comes to mind. After being away from his home for a decade, the dread of homelessness pushes him to take a difficult journey back to Ithaca after the fall of Troy for his wife Penelope. There are many things that flit through the mind as to how you would take your homecoming. Often, when I ponder on Odysseus, I get struck by a desperate idea that even for both of them, Ithaca is never really a home, until and unless Odysseus is back.
Not long ago, I had a conversation with an elderly relative who, with a heavy heart, shared how he regularly connects with his son through social media and video calls. They never miss a chance to see and talk to each other. Yet, despite these connections, he still feels a profound absence. In a way, modern technology hasn’t genuinely bridged the gap, and we both find ourselves missing home together.
Being at home is about being together with people with whom we have experienced the elating, joyous, and unforgettable moments of life together. Hence, the image of our native home, pictured together with our close friends, loved ones, and our family, is something we always carry inside the depths of being for the rest of our lives. Therefore, whenever we recall the memories of our native home, we always get a bit nostalgic, and that nostalgia always pulls us back to someone with whom we have shared the happiest experiences of life together, now wrapped inside the pages of our reminiscences.
I get a bit nostalgic whenever I think of all those wonderful moments I have shared with my brother in our home, playing music, writing songs, or debating together. My brother left home early, flying miles away, in search of new opportunities. In spite of all the technologies available for unrestrained interactions, we have not been able to overcome the gap of distance between us. And we genuinely missing the experience of being at home together.
Similarly, one of my close friends decided to move away in utter rejection after the sudden death of his mother. However, he always gets nostalgic when he thinks of those carefree days he had spent with his friends in a small, paltry rented room. He always reminds me that he never gets that same sense of solace elsewhere, even in a cozy apartment in a foreign land.
He often laments, and I agree with him, that home is where you are always encouraged, accepted, understood, and embraced just the way you are, with all your failures, weird ambitions, lousy mistakes, and imperfections. And, it’s truly a homeless experience when we are constantly judged and evaluated, and you have to always go on explaining about yourself to others all the time.
He argues that when he lived with his mother, she understood him like nobody; she could easily pick up all the hidden emotions of his sorrows hiding behind the shallow smile of his face. For years now he has been struggling to find a home away from his native home, but he grieves that all he has managed is to put together a house with all the standers of living and bit of extravagances but without a genuine feeling of acceptance, comfort, trust, care, togetherness and understanding.
After all, home is more of a feeling than just shapes and sizes, bricks and concrete; it is a combination of all those sweet memories, unforgettable happiness, and joyous moments of being together with people we trust, respect, and love. Home is something we carry inside our subconscious mind for the rest of our lives. Even when my migrant friends and expat relatives are sleeping secure and sound in their apartments aboard, at times they feel uneasy as if something is missing out altogether, and that is longing for home, because home is where we belong when we are together with individuals we love, respect, feel at ease with and always remember.
Gaurav Ojha is a faculty of communication, critical thinking, management, and research at different educational institutions inside the Kathmandu Valley. As a part of his creative interests, Mr. Ojha regularly publishes opinion posts, poems, and non-fiction articles on a wide range of topics, from death, disease, social issues, and humanism to spirituality.
