Man, the eternal nomad, searches throughout his life for his home. A place where he belongs, a place he can call his own. A place that embraces him with open arms, makes him feel warm, comfortable and at peace. After the long, tiring and frustrating day he spends facing the world, and his own fears reflected in it, his home provides him solace. It is his anchor, the place he falls back upon, the place he returns to.
But what exactly is this home? Is it just a particular configuration of bricks stacked together to give rise to a certain form? Then, wouldn’t the same bricks, when provided to a different architect, have given rise to a completely different home, maybe even one that was diametrically opposite in personality, character and vibes? Did the house have any control over how it was being constructed, and even if it had, did it even know that it could exercise that choice? Maybe its foundations were weak, but not weak enough to emerge on their own? Maybe they needed the intellectual vibrations of an earthquake?
So, it is not the bricks or their form.
What converts a house into a home? It is the people who inhabit it. The people who infuse their own hopes and aspirations, their superstitions, their philosophy into that home. Those fewer chairs in the drawing room, or those extra flower pots on the terrace; the belief that the study room’s cream-coloured walls could be more conducive to the purpose of the room than the existing white ones; or the pleasure from imagining the bedroom walls in splashes of navy blue with a few rivulets of green; or the persistence of the eight-year old to replace the forever creaking metallic door that opens up into the balcony with a wooden one – all of these constitute and create a home.
So, it is not the house that determines the home, but the ones who inhabit it.
Some houses are better than others, or so you would think. An extra parking lot, two extra balconies, a sea-facing view or a private kitchen garden and you are instantly enamoured. Oh how you wish you could have that house for yourself. It is your “dream house” and the place you “have always been looking for”.
But it is so easy to love a house just by viewing it from a distance. It is only when you start living in the house that you realise it has a faulty power supply; that its basement floods during the rainy season; that it provides easy passage to vermin from a broken drainage that is barely accessible. There is no way you can foresee how such things will affect or alter your love of that house; inevitably you will do a cost-benefit analysis to decide whether to stay or take the road again, in search of your next destination.
But how many times can you shift? What if each successive house had some problems or the other. Will you ever find your perfect dream house? Or will you remain the forever nomad, unable to settle for anything lesser than your demands?
If there is an initial favourable inclination, it can only be confirmed or denied by living in the house.
And did you ever ask your house if it also wanted an occupant like you? Did you know that your house gets irritated whenever your pet cat does her daily ritual on its marble flooring, or that its walls whimper whenever your nieces come over to your house, with their stack of crayons? That it is revolted by the stench of the stale food that inhabits your fridge, or that the fans in your room absolutely hate football, and each weekend they go into mourning after missing their tennis matches?
The walls of the house bear the lashings of the rain, the howling of the wind and keep you safe and warm, even while you complain about one small corner of one of the rooms, where a few chips of plaster have fallen off. Did you ever wonder what led to this, and why your walls lost their composure in the first place? Have you noticed the moss that is growing on the southern wall, or the cobwebs that invade your house when you get too busy with your personal life? Have you ever asked yourself why your house gets sick?
Think about it, if given the freedom, will your house have agreed to let you stay in it?
Will your house have chosen you?