Of late, returning home has begun to feel less of a homecoming than a mere stopover; a railway station Waiting Room on your way to somewhere, a petrol pump rest-stop you visit amidst of a long road trip. The visits are usually quick, unsurprising, and occur only at extremely necessary points on the way. You aren't there permanently -- not anymore -- you're always on your way, always headed somewhere else. "Ah back from ____ I see, when you did arrive when are you going back?" A pauseless question delivered in a single breath, most often. You're allowed to be permanent anywhere but here, my neighbours' quizzical faces seemed to imply. "On Christmas break from college, uncle". Yes my exams are over, aunty". "Sem starts next week". The array of stock responses I keep in my armory to satisfy the inquirer. Except now, I've run out of semesters and examinations to run back to; my verbal ammunition has run dry.
* * *
I remember leaving for Chennai like it was yesterday, crying in the car, the first time it hit me that this was the last time I was leaving with all these beds and buckets, that once the car left the gates I wouldn't be coming back home to stay the way I used to. Oh, there would be returns of course. Homecomings, long-anticipated yet short-lived vacation days, semester breaks, Christmas breaks. Course-endings. But any more visits I made would be just that: visits. Short, temporary breaks that jutted in between actual, real, Life happening elsewhere, in big confusing cities far, -- in all senses -- far away from the overgrown weeds and broken down old swing in my backyard. I suppose I should call it my parents' backyard now. From hereon after, I would always be expected to go back to wherever it was that I'd come from, carrying rucksacks full of laundry and gifts. Better yet, I'd one day be asked to go off even farther with huge, permanent suitcases that could carry my whole life's weight easily; with fewer and fewer "callbacks" each year, I'd then transform into a true visitor in every sense of the word. Ah, the unique privilege of the girl child in this country.
* * *
So, when I started 'making over' my bedroom at home, the inevitable question arose in me: Why? Why bother? Why buy all those posters from Amazon, why put up those plants in the window, why unpack your usual three travelling bags when you're probably gonna have to wrap it all back up in a month or two's time? Why spend hours organizing my numerous journals and diaries and class-trip souvenirs and old birthday trinkets when my mum would have no idea what to do with them once I was no longer around to explain each one's significance in painstaking detail?
* * *
Nonetheless, I persisted. A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction, said Woolf in 1929. My dreams of book-writing notwithstanding, this woman is entirely happy having just the room alone, if not for fiction's sake then for the sake of her own sanity. And so, here's to my (at least at the moment of publication) wonderfully transient room -- I'll remember you fondly from some faraway steel bed and rickety wooden table-and-chair set-up I'll be calling My Room in the as yet unnamed city that I end up in soon enough.
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