Shifting Homes and thoughts around it

We have changed three homes in the past two years. It seems adventurous. Sometimes it is. But to me, I changed four places of residence including the present one where I live. In 2018, five years of law school life ended, I came home knowing that we will shift to a new home. I came back home, lived five months in it, shifted to a rented one for a few months again and then bought the current home, the present one. 

But then, this much shifting got me into thinking. Thinking that, homes are not just comfort and warmth, they are our habits and acquaintances. We do not realise when we fall in love with it and they enter all of our habits and then all the intricacies of our lives. They determine our freedom and liberty.  Our identity ends up getting somehow shaped up by the kind of home we have and home we built for us. The small details come up as big privileges. Spending thirteen years at a place is long enough to see different shades of ourselves, our people around us and life itself. 

Graduation degree made me so close to nature, that I had the privilege to look at a vast ground while standing anytime I wanted on my balcony. I also saw one suspicious blurred image of a man standing outside the boundary post mid-night on the balcony. Life got so adventurous that,I also heard screams of a woman randomly in the hollowness of dark nights. 

The nature was as if ordered by us for our view only. The students in the same row having the same view, could see rain coming before it actually rained as clouds gathered before us in the sky, as if discussing when to present the show for us. I could guess by looking at clouds dominating one half of the sky that they are raining in that portion and then in the next few minutes, it used to  rain in the ground before us. Nature was in our lives, intertwined in our breath sometimes. Particularly, when it rained. I remember this fondly more because now, I know nature to urban places is not just history, it is that irrecoverable past which can be found only in literature and photography. Oh, we can find the traces of it in famous parks , Nehru Park, Lodi Garden and the ones in our colony. Remaining imprints are in our small flower pots in our balcony. 

I do not crave going back to those classes, my room even but just having nature so closely. The place where I live now , when I get down from the metro, I can see the Bisleri factory and the smoke coming out and diffusing in the sky and I am reminded of the sunrises and sunsets during college. There are three malls within walking distance from my home. I see big brands which sell clothes at unjustified prices. I myself go and buy clothes from them sometimes. I cannot bargain and argue at the mall,  taking the whole fun away from the whole process of shopping. 

That place was home for a good five years and now, living in one of the most polluted cities in India is home. Before these two homes , very blissful thirteen years came, government quarters which is where I came home to right after graduation. It is one of the posh areas of delhi. If one is living in a posh area in Delhi, nature is at its best. One can roam around and take long walks as I did for more than a decade. Nehru Park is nearby. Mode of transportation is cheap and affordable with buses coming frequently  to all parts of Delhi. I used to go with mum so frequently to Sarojini Nagar with anticipation because I knew this market was within my pocket. I will bargain and I can buy so many necessary and unnecessary clothes I want. The roads are wide, less traffic, there were no multi-storey buildings. That was home, that felt like home, like near to heart. I was under the assumption that I like changes, in fact I am adjustable to changes but I was being naive. When I had to leave this area, I could not feel that not just home, many habits are going to be altered. 

I did not anticipate that instead of people and spaces,  nature is going to be missed so much. I drool over empty roads and Sarojini Nagar. Now, I see the sky touching multi-storey buildings and I think fire-extinguishers cannot reach that much height. Why are we building flats without emotions and precautions? 

I feel like I am going back to the first semester of college, when I missed the old trees on both sides of the roads. With time, perhaps, home can be made everywhere. With time, if we shift homes with our loved ones, we can create new homes. 

Shifting homes, shifts something within us.It discomforts me, as if just heartbroken, as if I am supposed to love a person with as much intensity as I loved before. But I take time to love, to not love and unless many events have come naturally in life recently which would put newly created layers and barriers within me and that moment, I keep going back. This resonates with what I feel, this part I just wrote, of feeling heartbroken. I have felt it many times. But shifting homes would be like this,this is a bit surprising. Perhaps, there is a lesson here for me, that I take time, always, to figure out and make sense of big events in my life. Like homes, when we love someone, we let them enter within us, they take some space, we let them do that willingly. Then, when they go, the space is there and we do not know what to do with it. Possibly a similar feeling when a long friendship slips away. It has to, the time has come. It was supposed to sometime back , just that we did not have courage to recognise it. 

All this seems perhaps gloomy, but then I looked up at the sky today while standing on the roof of my current home while conversing with my close school friend, Sweety , I saw the crescent moon. I also saw many stars in the sky and large clouds today and I found myself a bit closer to nature. I re-told myself which I have always, time heals everything. There is nothing time cannot do. Like always, it would make this place home too.