Page 219 - Kolaj Sharodiya Review Edition

I learnt early the need for an overt demeanour of conformity while not letting go of my spirit. I was going to survive home. In fact since my late childhood to the adult years, I
remember myself tiptoeing in the dark of the night into the bathroom and gazing out from the window at the moon, the hazy stars and probably at a very grey, uneventful sky,
praying hard for an escape to someplace ‘home’. In my mind I was probably at the liminal location at the window sill, from which I had already begun my journey for ‘home’
despite not knowing the destination/s out there.

As women, if we decide to not conform to the dominant expectations of gender, and sexuality, those who represent ‘home’ usually seek us out as aberrations.

I did find home though, in sites and experiences I had not imagined.

The 24/7 library at a social sciences university in Mumbai where I studied for two years, was the first of such sites. At any hour of the day or night it extended the comfort of home
in the public space where I could be reading, thinking, dressed and sitting in any way I wanted and be left to myself without needing to perform ‘normalcy’. By the time I left
home, I had started to flee at the remote hint of being and becoming a ‘normal’ woman. None of my later decisions, academic and otherwise, received much approval, but
in pursuing them, I found that home of my childhood prayers in people, moments, circumstances and even in crisis.

On a late sultry Hyderabad evening, I fell a few steps spraining and cracking my foot at the apartment of a scholar from Austria. She and a gentleman from Afganistan, whom
we both didn’t know, brought me to the hospital and for the next fifteen days I was cared for by two agricultural scientists from Maharashtra and Kerala who approximately
slept thrice a week, in their effort to be efficient. These two scientists, in breaking every other norm that was possible for them to break, inadvertently also set me free. In my early
days in Hyderabad, two women in burqa seeing me wait for over 10 minutes at the Mehdipatnam crossing, held my hand to pull me along with them and crossed the road. I
will always regret not knowing their kind faces. Once a Hyderabadi cab driver, on finding out that I didn’t have siblings, said he felt sorry for me and offered to be the brother I
never had. At yet another time, a woman I had only come to know for a very short while, offered to drive me more than 250 kms in the middle of night from Keele university to
the Heathrow airport as the coach service seemed disrupted. Later, she worked across time zones to repeatedly read, edit and re-edit the chapters of my dissertation. I found
home in her unquestioned, calm support that my cousins and I had sought our entire lives. Over time, most of my closest friends who decided to never marry and never have
children affirmed that part of me that wanted to remain unapologetic for my choices. Each of them, like my idea of the Goddess, didn’t want to belong to any paternal or
marital homes. And in a strange twist of fate, the participants of my PhD dissertation turned out to be adolescents of Bihari lineage. Born, raised and attending school in Kolkata,
and thus at the intersection of two ethno-cultural identities. As they negotiated the competing scripts of ‘home’, drawn from two ethno-cultural locations of Kolkata and rural
Bihar, I saw in them some of my own unresolved questions that had haunted me all my life.

I laughed aloud in my heart as I coded the data for the chapter on ‘writing home.’ Those prayers in the dark of the night to some nonchalant god of my childhood, who never
seemed to care, began making sense. I had wanted to un-write or re-write the ‘home’ and it is what I had been offered the opportunity to do.

What if my cousin, while being reprimanded and asked to choose between my mother and the scorpion, had chosen to shelter the latter, on that day long ago?