Why do some of us identify so completely with a house that we never want to leave it? What makes those four walls, a mere brick and cement structure, so irreplaceable in the heart when there are similar ones elsewhere?
Could it all boil down to our childhood?
Maybe we spent our entire childhood and youth in one home, sleeping in the same bed, dumping our books on the same shelf, tossing our shoes onto the same rack and settling into the notion that there could only be one safe haven for us.
Or maybe we cling to a house because we moved too often when we were young. Did all those frequent postings of a parent in a ‘transferable’ job leave us with no chance to call one place home as we went from town to town, changing schools, leaving old friends behind and trying to make new ones?
It is commonplace to hear friends and acquaintances, especially the elderly among them, say that they would hate to be uprooted and leave their houses. Even if they will be in a comfortable and safe environment, will have congenial company, will be close to their families and well cared for, nothing compensates in their eyes for the familiarity of things like light switches and furniture placements, made three or four or more decades ago, that they can now find blindfold, by sheer instinct.
For us, it is tough to understand that logic.
Our childhood was spent in different places, small district hamlets that barely qualified to be called ‘towns’. We had no parks and libraries and movie theatres nearby — if they existed in those town at all! Our houses were generally in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by large open areas and we were lucky if we had neighbours within a couple of kilometres. We had nowhere to go every day since we were home-schooled in the early years — and we therefore learnt to be content within the confines of the house. It was everything to us — learning area, play space, gourmet-meal place. We just needed to switch on and switch off a couple of mental buttons and the house was anything we wanted it to be.
That did not stop us, however, from looking forward to the next house we went to. Sure, we would not have that space beside the built-in cupboard where we could hide for hours and read our books and the new house could not possibly have the branch of a guava tree just outside the window for us to climb onto and flee when big brother or big sister was chasing us — but it would have something else. Something surprising that we could mould in our imaginations to yield even greater thrills that what we had had so far. The immense ‘possibilities’ of future homes were what kept us ever ready, and more than that, ever eager, to go to the next house.
We exulted also about all the things we wouldn’t have to do: If we moved often enough, we would never need to settle up our desks and our cupboards and that dumping ground beneath our beds. We could just sweep everything up and box it — and we would soon have another space in another house to mess up as we willed!
No doubt, along the way, some aspect of those houses — especially the memories created in them — captured our hearts, but a house was still just a house for us. Even when we shifted into our very own, very hard-earned ‘permanent’ apartment, we didn’t think twice about locking up and leaving at a moment’s notice to create memories elsewhere.
It was all a part of the adventure of living.
Cheryl Rao is a journalist based in India.
