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Somerset Maugham in his short story titled Home writes about a man who, at an early age, leaves his residence in England for China. He then spends over fifty years in the Far East without ever contacting his family back home. And one fine day, without any advance notice, he returns home for good. That is all there is to the story. There is no description of the character’s motivation for this strange behavior, not much of a plot in it, either; hardly any sense of anticipation or drama. It must be more than a decade since I read this -- rather unremarkable -- story. And yet, the story, tucked deep in the recesses of my memory, suddenly resurfaced as I was driving to Miami this past December. Much of my younger days in India were spent in Madras, which, like Miami, is full of sunshine, beaches, palm trees and bright-colored fruits and flowers. For me, going to the tropical parts of the world is like visiting my childhood home. But that is not the reason I was reminded of the story.
This fondness for returning home must be a newly acquired one because not all that long ago, as an angst-ridden teenager, I was elated at the prospect of leaving home and traveling far up north to a college at the very foothills of Himalayas. I liked it there in the quiet village of Roorkee. At last, after eighteen years of parental supervision, I was a free man. And the feeling of elation was even more intense when I left Roorkee and traveled even farther from home, to the United States. My parents were aghast when at the airport, after collecting the boarding pass, I proceeded to the gate without ever turning back to wave them good-bye. To this day they narrate this incident to me with a sense of disbelief (and disgust).
Life has been good so far here in the United States. I made a few great friends in college, received a master’s degree in engineering and found jobs to my liking. With the money that I earned, I have managed to travel to Europe, Brazil and China. Last year I graduated from a ‘resident alien’ to ‘permanent resident’ status. So I have two homes now! But like the writer Pico Iyer, the notion of being a ‘global soul’ without any home or roots has always appealed to me.
Just a few months back, when I was standing in line at a gas station in Ohio, a homesick Indian graduate student at the cash register could not contain his curiosity and asked me where I was from. “Well, I don’t have a good answer for that question. I have lived in different places and I can’t call any one place my home,” I replied, cavalierly. The student was visibly crushed by my answer. His attempt to recall and relish fond memories from home with another Indian was rebuffed.
My intention with that response was not to be indifferent or apathetic, but to cherish the fact that I had left home and traveled as far as I possibly could. Finally, by rejecting the concept of a home, I had reached a state of permanent freedom. And on this front, I had come to be like my own dad. He left Madras in his twenties and went to Mussoorie (a hill resort in the Himalayas) to be trained as a government officer to work in the Postal Service. From there he traveled all across India. He lived and worked in Bangalore, Trivandrum, Shillong, Bhubaneshwar, Madras, New Delhi and Bombay. When he had saved up enough money he bought a house in Bangalore and planned to retire there. When his parents asked him to buy a house in Madras and be close to them, he refused politely. He made it seem like Bangalore was his new home, and that was how we believed it was going to be.
But just days before his retirement he announced that he was going to settle down in Madras. He rented a two-bedroom apartment in T.Nagar and moved in there with all his belongings. There was no mention of the ‘Bangalore home’ after that. The money collected from the tenants there helped him pay off the rent for his apartment in Madras. Suddenly the Bangalore home was reduced to a financial asset that could be leveraged for cash flow reasons. And this past December he announced that he had bought a house very near the apartment. Finally, at the age of sixty-three my father chose to live in a house that he owned!
His actions made no sense to me. Why would someone plan his future so very well, make all the right moves, and then abandon it all? What did he see in Madras now that he had not seen in the city thirty years earlier? As I was driving down to Miami, I was wrestling with these questions and trying to resolve them in my own mind. But I could not come up with a good explanation. And then, as I caught the very first glimpse of palms trees and sandy beaches in Florida, this story of Maugham flashed across my mind. The answer was right there for me to read. No matter how far you travel from home, at the end of the day, when everything is said and done, you have to still turn back and go home. And your home is always the place where you grew up as a child with your family and friends. That is what made the Englishman come back to his family after fifty years in the Far East, and that is what compelled my dad to buy a house in Madras and finally be able retire in a place that he could call his home.
Mukund Narasimhan
February 2003
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