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Seeking Home

The place where J was born is the place I became myself I think. By Pico Iyer's definition is this would my home though I was born in Kolkata. I met someone I knew from there recently who has been there the whole time while I have moved around and called several other places "home". By measuring the length of time I have been anywhere, it could call where I live now my home - twenty years is the longest I have lived anywhere, so that should qualify for home status. What that also means that leaving what one calls home is difficult in ways that cannot be explained rationally. Its like my friend from Kolkata who is the third generation in the city from the time her grandfather came there in the 1930s from present-day Bangladesh. 

They have a lovely ancestral home in central Kolkata complete with a little pond for ducks minus the ducks. The place is well-maintained with her generation of siblings and cousins sharing responsibility of the upkeep of the place. Leaving that house to go live anywhere else in the world would be an impossibility. S is rooted there and as such must find work in the city instead of going elsewhere in India or abroad. She married someone who was comfortable joining the extended family and living in her section of the house - its takes a certain kind of man to be willing to do that and for it to work well. For S all that has come true. 

When we first met in the early 90s, people in IT were leaving India in droves to go solve Y2K for the world. S had any number of opportunities to join their ranks but she did not. For her the home she was born was also the home where the big events of her life happened - first job, marriage, children. At that point it is no longer possible to rehome. My two decades in my current home is a blip on the radar compared to S's timescale and even that makes rehoming feel hard. 
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