To find a home

 I turned 40 in the November of 2025. And just a few years before that, I had felt that my life should be different after 40. And so it turned out to be so. A few months back, I decided to switch jobs, and not just that, I decided to switch cities. I had worked at SEA for about 12 years in Mumbai - a city I called my home. A city that gave me the intellectual stimulus to do what I do today. And yet, after coming back from the USA in 2014, the city slowly revealed to me differently. I could never point out whether I had changed from the worldly exposure of the West, or had the city taken to transform itself completely. The politics of the city had changed. It was caught up into infrastructural expansions, redevelopment, upgradation all at once. And I was to groove back into this transforming city that I had imagined to be my home. But that never happened successfully.

I was older, lonelier despite having increased social access through my work. I made many friends, entered many circles, and fulfilling too. And for a large time, work kept me consumed. But yet, I did not have a person to go back to, except my biological family. This family that we are born into, never disappoints, but it cannot fulfil the gap of that one person that we make home with. While work kept me consumed, the search for this person intensified over the years. But the city had become globalized meaning, people worked for different countries while being here, in different time zones, travelled from faraway places for work, had a distant home to go back to, and manage anything in these slivers of time. A churn of transience. But home, seemed a condition of bodily settlement.

After twelve years of approaching stability, as I just felt that I could make some settlement with my  condition of singlehood, suddenly work seemed to become increasingly troubling. I suddenly felt displaced in the aspect of life which I had prioritized significantly over the last twelve years, that perhaps I had made my home. I still find it hard to articulate and understand what precisely bothered me more. Did the place of work become too much like my hetero-biological family? Did my sense of self grow too strong? Could my desire for professional growth not be fully contained and legitimized within this space? Or did my growing self assurance put people at odds with their older version of my vulnerable self? To find home within oneself seemed a complete misfit within the scheme of the outside world...

Is this what is the experience of queerness then? Should finding home for the queer body be always the realization of being misfit in one way or the other? And should we be spending so much energy and time to fight or fit in an existing order...? 

Nevertheless, so, right after turning 40, an opportunity to visit Europe fell in my lap - a conference in Lund, Sweden. And it seemed like a good personal marker. In the mean time, I had decided to experiment home in a new geography. I expressed my desire to move on to a new work place at SEA, and applied for a position with a more commensurate position and pay at CEPT. At the time, stepping away seemed like the only option despite the fact that my professional and domestic life seemed to have conjoining-ly worked out only if my workplace appreciated my contribution. But after a long wait, I had to move on, and I decided to come to Ahmedabad to experiment home afresh.

The last month has been about this transition. I have not taken a real break in years. Indefatigably working to keep myself mentally occupied. I had imagined my Europe tour to bring me some break (something I am still finding the words to describe over a post), but perhaps I packed too much in too little time. A conference, a solo trip, the handover at SEA, the move to a new city, the house hunt in Ahmedabad, transitioning into a new work atmosphere... I have been taking things slowly and steadily, and yet, it is exhausting. I am unsure what this exhaustion indexes. And how is one to make home in a place with no social or geographical roots, from scratch?

This is perhaps then, the new challenge of life at 40. I landed in Ahmedabad on 2nd June with literally no one to guide in the city. Thanks to the internet and my colleague Shreyank's lending of his house that I am able to undertake my house hunt in some secure way. Yet, there is a haunting question of the home - is it the place or the person that will bring home to me? How would it be to return to an empty shell after work, how would my social life pan out? What could making home entail in this new place with new social codes? Who would I share my experiences with? Is it the sharing of the everyday that makes the home - and should the lack of it make one feel homeless?

It is almost paradoxical that we move so much to feel settled! Virtuous are those who have come to terms with becoming comfortable in their mobile lives. I was not raised in a manner to appreciate movement as home - at least it has to have one condition satisfied - a person or a place. And there have been examples where this person or place could be imaginary. But we the wretched sons of Marx are marred by material life and conditions, or in other words maya. There seems to be a significant journey ahead, beyond 40 still, to find a home.