Home

When I was 10, it used to be about piping hot dosas on my plate on a Sunday morning spent with my favorite cartoon on TV.

A few years later, home became the hum of our old washing machine that made my clothes fragrant and wearable again. Every six months.

Some time later, it became my voice of conscience spurting out every time I touched alcohol or crashed weddings for food.

A few years ago, that train of thought derailed as I moved cities and jobs.

“Where are you from?” — That question confused me in more ways than I ever imagined it would.

At the gym, I’d be talking to an Iranian and tell him that I was from around ‘here’. And he’d get it.

To my conservative landlord, I’d be a vagabond ‘outsider’ shacking up with other fellow ‘outsiders’, partying away on weekends.

To my Tinder matches, I’d proclaim myself to be a South Indian. Because that’s what my skin and surname signified.

But I never grew up in Bangalore, where I spent 10 years feeling like an ‘outsider’. Nor do I speak or identify with a single South Indian language.

As a family, the four of us never speak, watch movies or sing songs in the language we call our ‘mother tongue’.

I cook Italian food like a pro and, until a few years ago, I’d swear I might have an alter ego in Milan, rocking it out as a chef.

‘Where is home?’ ‘Where am I from?’

7 cities.

2 countries.

and 9 languages later,

I go back every night to the nicotine-enthused, hurrying heartbeats of the man of my dreams and fall asleep to that rhythm.

Where is home? It doesnt matter.