The Etymology of Home
In his Online Etymology Dictionary, the historian Douglas R. Harper describes the word ‘home” “in its full range and feeling” as “a conception that belongs distinctly to the word home” and “not covered by any single word in most of the Indo-European languages.” A primal, beginner home is the womb, where the fortunate are cocooned and nourished, where the weather and temperature are just right, and safety is a given. This, then, is the environment we attempt to re-create, time and again, once out in the world.
Old English ham “dwelling place, house, abode, fixed residence; estate; village; region, country.”
In the beginning, my home was a unit of two suffering once-lovers, who had given me life and no longer wanted each other. They fought over me as if I were a precious inheritance—their only remaining evidence of the life they had created together, each wanting to keep(sake) me for themselves. Their arms gestured in rage and fear above my head, stopping only to make sure that I had eaten or napped, occasionally dispersing sporadic, unruly showers of love in my general direction. In this manner, they provided an uneasy wartime roof over my head, trying to protect me from their own grenades. My childhood felt a lot like climbing onto a Ferris wheel that had lost control. It kept flailing around, in directions chosen by a pair of unpredictable scientists trying to study futuristic Ferris wheels. Fun at first, but you got sick afterward. The scientists were my parents.
Everything they said and did was of the future. I was born in Calcutta, India, in the eighties, and this posed a problem. Nothing about my family was normal, for the time.
First, they were divorced. At the time, the only other people who were divorced, that we knew of, were white, promiscuous, or movie stars (one and the same). This has no basis in fact but this was the code we lived by, that I was raised by, and certainly the code that my school playground swore by. Mothers were tremendously suspicious of us. By us, I mean the package of my divorced parents + me (= original sin). Divorce threatened the fabric of our well-bred community and nowhere was this perception writ larger than on the disapproving faces of these matriarchs, intent on protecting their young from examples of such corruptors of life and faith.
To be nothing to write home about, “unremarkable” is from 1907.
Our biggest crime though, was that we were deeply Western. I own a photograph of my grandmother—the one who eventually raised me, my father’s mother—well into her fifties, lithe in a bikini, posing on a beach somewhere with her sister (a curmudgeon of repute except in her romance novels and except when confronted by the endless cheer of my grandmother). My family thought in English, ate ham, had money, got divorced/had affairs/had sex (one and the same), and made periodic disappearances abroad. All of this resulted in the mother squad keeping the good kids quite far away from me. They had reached an agreement among themselves, and I knew this by the way they looked at me and whisked my classmates away after school. Even my academic achievements (the highest virtue in mother squad book) were not enough to let me near their kids.
None of this made me particularly unhappy. Inevitably, being the forbidden bad apple made me an object of attention. I unfurled lazily, under the wide-eyed gaggle of collected classmates, reveling in the dubious glory of my family’s escapades. I brought lunchboxes filled with foreign luxuries—miniature Cadbury chocolates and Laughing Cow cheeses, little candied fruit, salami sandwiches, and other exotic items from foreign shores—that amazed my audience.
My mostly female teachers would gossip about the latest rumors surrounding my parents, guiltily springing a little away from each other when I would walk in, the hush of their tones still filling the room. Every once in a while, one of the faculty would be extra attentive, sympathy welling up as she asked how I was. I would proceed to relay fabulous tales of my father’s new wife, my mother’s latest tantrum, the vacation to Europe my grandmother had recently taken me on, the couple I saw smooching in the streets of London. The problem was that it was all true, and they knew it. My classmates were middle- to upper-class kids and their mothers were suburban housewives for the most part. They belonged to families that succeeded at achieving that normal bar of happiness, where men and women stayed together and had children who studied and became doctors and engineers. Where women worked in schools to pass the long afternoon hours and not succumb to watching the television all day. I was the inappropriate little charlatan with stories about a world they were horrified by and addicted to.
Slang phrase make (oneself) at home “become comfortable in a place one does not live” dates from 1892 (at home “at one’s ease” is from 1510s).
At ten or eleven, I begin to think and dream in English, like other children of the postcolonial Catholic-schooled families of Bengal. Yet Bengali remained at the base of my tongue, emerging like quicksilver, as a knee jerk or an instinct, when I was frightened or upset or in need of expressing love. Home as language, a mother tongue, was that to which I returned to know who I was. I made one friend who saw through me. Daisy was entertained by my life but possibly pragmatic about the reality of it, enough to offer me the dismal bread and jam sandwiches she brought to school (every single day) for the eighteen years we spent in those hallways. She was indifferent to my parents because her own had fought so vengefully for so many years (they never divorced, continuing to live under the same roof, refusing to eat even a single meal together). This brought first an awkward silence on the school bus (we had nothing to talk about; she never wanted to know anything about my family) and later, the relief of a union bound by common interests, a debate team, books, a shared love for my grandmother, and the desire to play badminton before class started. With Daisy, I could shut up and look outside the window.
My parents had fallen madly in love and married before my mother was twenty. (My father would later confide in me that he was unduly rushed into a wedding—an unreliable narrative, I suspect, and unconfirmed.) My father was a bad-tempered, good-hearted young playboy with a car, that singular achievement in a neighborhood filled with somewhat wealthy young men, all intellectual, every one of them an armchair revolutionary, modeled along the lines of the freedom fighters who were our grandfather and uncles. I came along about six months before their marriage fell apart, approximately two years after they had met at a neighborhood festival, my mother’s pale skin forming halos in my father’s dilated, dark eyes. The neighborhood lived vicariously through their romance, like it never had before. This was reality television before its inception, a brightly buzzing honeypot of scandal, for everyone except us.
In those years, if my parents could have stood in the center of the street that divided their homes and yanked on either of my arms, they would have. My father would later describe to me the sweaty judge in an airless courtroom who awarded my upbringing to my mother, without a second look at any of our paperwork or our lives, as he had done in the two other cases of divorce that had come before him that year. Mothers were widely known to be maternal—nurture being their prime function—and that was the only decree that the court was interested in.
My mother and I lived in a tiny studio on the top floor of her parents’ ancestral home. In the same house lived her brothers and uncles, their wives, my many cousins, my great grandfather, and, in the servant quarters, a dozen maids. The idea of these “joint” families, large sprawls of relatives all housed under one roof was common in India; they served as an army of witnesses and provided commentary on the days of our lives. My mother’s home was about a block from where my father lived with his parents (about two blocks from the fateful site of their meeting) in a two-bedroom apartment filled with light. My father (struggling to pass accountancy exams at the time) was given permission by the courts to visit me once every few weeks—an event my mother spent much of her spare time plotting to thwart. Since she tutored, translated, and studied most of the day—trying to survive, parent, turn twenty-two, and keep me alive (I had developed the desire to barely eat/cuss at strangers/climb dangerous trees, and on occasion an electric pole)—this was a strain on her. Years later, as an adult, I would discover photographs of a beautiful woman—large eyes, small face, all youth and loveliness and holding an infant, or a toddler, and I would be taken aback that this was my mother. For years, all I remembered was a spiteful, wizened face, attached to the bony arms I feared. She would go to work and leave me with my mostly deaf great grandfather (the only nonjudgmental babysitter available on the block) and I would alternate between hiding his thick glasses and swinging my legs out of the prison-like bars of the great windows of his library-like rooms and listening to his stories about cricket. He would shout out the word “MARXIST” often, in rants I did not understand.
My mother’s family lives in an old, crumbling home that still smells of the same books and musk I smell when I visit my uncles who live there; men who continue to live off their inheritances, who are always between businesses that they start and fail at periodically. They are alcoholics and bad husbands, and they do nothing all day but have academic, utopian beliefs on a political system that has ceased to exist. They are the lost sons of Bengal, the once-wealthy landowners, pining for the old days of war when they might at least have been freedom fighters, might have amounted to more than this endless charade of tea and boardgames and hot debates and bitter cussing and genial brotherhood that they secretly despise, and not morph into these well-fed, sloth-like selves that they secretly loathe. But this is Calcutta, and here is Bengal, where we stop still in time and revoke the past desperately. Where time and the shiny new malls on Park Street jostle our identity, shake the ground of the literature and theater and music that was supposed to be enough to be a citizen. Surely, the past was enough? Surely being enraged was enough? Do we have to dust off the books and go to work and do we have to be vulgar and shameless enough to earn?
My father went on to marry a woman he had fallen in love with while trying to avoid my mother’s bitter tirades on his failures, the endless enlarged silences between them, and the intense fracture of their marriage. My stepmother (this was a term my mother hated; she would have possibly preferred only the word “step”) was a colleague at his firm (his secretary, a fact I found out only after reading my mother’s diary from the time, many years later) and was introduced to me as “Aunty.” Aunty was a vision in pink the first time I met her, like a magazine image of dreamy chiffon and floral perfume that descended into our lives. She was the first woman in my life to take makeup seriously, to wear makeup seriously. She knew all about Hollywood stars and had the unique ability to wear things like faux diamonds or prints studded with implausible stones and exude a peculiar glamor. My mother took to calling her a slut (as I believe much of the neighborhood did in private)—a word I repeated faithfully, everywhere I went, including to my shocked grandmother, but never to my dad. The newlyweds moved into a little apartment in a cheaper part of town, miles away from me. My besotted father did not forget about me, however. Instead, he tried doubly hard, sneaking into my school to give me little tidbits before the bus arrived to take me home, visiting me like a soft-footed thief for little illegal sojourns while my mother was at work and my great grandfather slept in his armchair—great sonorous snores that served as warning for when he might wake. I missed my father intensely when I didn’t see him and hated the thought of my mother arriving home, the smell of her talcum powder, the stern order to do my homework, the way she would lean back exhausted against the steel cupboards as she sat on the floor trying to feed her tyrant monster child who took special pleasure in soft, timeless chews, cud-like, until the mouthful rolled around in my mouth and tasted as ugly as the hatred we both felt.
home (v.) 1765, “to go home,” from home (n.). Meaning “be guided to a destination by radio signals, etc.” (of missiles, aircraft, etc.) is from 1920; it had been used earlier in reference to pigeons.
One afternoon, as I swung from the guava tree in my great grandfather’s compound, I remember idly contemplating throwing the hard, bitter fruit at the new watchman. I remember wondering what my grandmother was doing, a street away. (I know now: watching The Bold and the Beautiful at 3 pm or folding laundry after returning from the school where she taught English.) I was six and was not allowed to be out on the street on my own. I had never been out on the street, or near cars on my own. The watchman was asleep. Even though my grandmother was only a street away, she was so far away, so inaccessible; she was an unconditional well of good humor and love in the lives of all of us that knew her, including my mother who was incapable of a single kind thought for anyone in my father’s universe. Sometimes, people—family, or an old friend—will remark that I remind them of my grandmother, and I am instantly reduced to feeling like a fraud. I know what they are seeing—her bones in my cheeks, the slight of her build, the veins on the surface of our hands leading all the way into the thin, short fingers. I knew there was a strange good that lived inside my grandmother that stopped her from blaming the world and that treated us all—the damned, unfurling family she had had to shoulder incessantly—with pure affection.
That afternoon of the guava tree, I ran into the street; I was dressed in one of those little vests with small holes all over it that my mother would make me wear even during the hottest days. That, and my white underwear. I was six and barefoot and once I started running, I didn’t stop till I reached my grandmother’s door, about half a mile away. I remember the sounds of the street—noisy, blaring pedestrians and traffic, rickshaws, and hawkers. The shopkeepers or some of the neighbors must have seen me running by—everyone knew who I was. But nobody stopped me, and it was one long run and I remember feeling only the anticipation of seeing my grandmother’s thrilled face. I don’t even remember the first words she said to me, but there was something wonderful to eat (maybe fried fish), and my father came to see me that evening, and I never went back to my mother again. All it had taken in the end was one fell blow, as I proudly unearthed the last remnants of my mother’s rages, my war scars and badges of honor, and even the mark left on my forehead from a year ago, when she had thrown one of her daily-use, uninspired, stubby-heeled shoes in my direction. Even to her shoes, I cannot be generous.
With my grandmother, my childhood had finally begun and it was filled with magazines and hard-boiled lemon candies. I was, in my mind, the tragic orphan who had been rescued and reunited with my true family and given warm milk, a pretty bedroom, toys, and a second chance. My grandmother gave me more love than I had needed to start with, so it felt just, as though excess was the answer to the seeming absence thus far. Those years with her taught me how to be decent and the benefits of unconditional love. At the time, I basked in the dizzying warmth, entirely unsure of how to live a life where there was no hiding or lying or fear and loathing. I learnt the ways of normal life: going to school, coming back to my grandmother, looking forward to the coming back, taking a nap, waking up and finding her there, going down to play and knowing she would be upstairs, her making me lunch, her putting me to bed, or her watching television. The more entrenched I became in this new existence, the more fearful I was of losing it, and I would wake up sometimes from nightmares in which my grandmother had suddenly died, cold panic clutching at me. I would run into her bedroom and reassure myself she was still breathing. Later, as a teenager, when she was dead, I would sometimes wake up from the same dream and smoke a cigarette in her room, reassuring myself that at least I was still alive.
homefront, 1918, from home (n.) + front (n.) in the military sense. A term from World War I; popularized (if not coined) by the agencies running the U.S. propaganda effort.
There was, a few years later, an incident with a Playboy magazine. The only thing my parents had in common was a love for books. I had easy, unsupervised access to hordes of dusty jackets, anything I chose from pulp to poetry. My sexual awakening was entirely born from these pages; television hadn’t arrived in my home yet. At thirteen, I knew altogether too much about matters involving marriages, brothels, and the like—all filtered through the explicit frankness of good, bad, and middling fiction. Investigating my father’s old books one afternoon, I found a copy of Playboy magazine. This is where literature veers sharply from the lens of pornography. The images made me stare, both in awe and horror. Could it really be, that my father was capable of this? It was the first time I “saw” sex and the first time I realized the truth of him having had sex with my mother, and with that image in my mind, I was, naturally, aghast. I could not look at him all day without remembering the photos and that the magazine was his. It was an odd blur and suddenly, as though the image of them had triggered some realization of the origins of my birth, I wanted to see my mother. I wanted to apologize to her, for she was never what I made her out to be—only exhausted and embittered and inexcusable, but never evil.
But my mother was long gone, free of me and free to be vile and vicious elsewhere, as someone else’s mother. Free of the birthday parties that she had painstakingly organized year after year, of the ugly donkey piñata that had to be hung so it would explode right over my head when I least expected it, enveloping us in Styrofoam and sweets, and we would laugh so hard at the sight of everyone scrambling for the prize on the floor, our eyes locked in secret joy that the prize was mine, that she had kept it for me in the drawer of the broken chipped red nightstand, by the bed we slept in together.