Home: First and Last

A Korean lady comes visiting to my house and asks if she can read some passages from the Bible to me. I do not see any signs of the proselytizing priesthood often present in such callers. She is smiling, and even when I tell her that I am not a Christian, she continues to give me a brilliant smile. Her attractiveness makes me want to listen to her. I invite her in, and we sit down to talk.

She has a Bible in her hand. On the cover I notice the letters NIV. I ask her what that means. She tells me it means New International Version. She opens the Bible and flips the pages rapidly. I notice that each page has the Korean translation alongside the English text. She has neatly underlined in red some passages. She starts to tell me what God says in the Bible: that He knew me before He sent me to this earth and that my body is made of dust and that He has infused my body with His spirit. At the end of my life my body will return to dust, and the spirit will merge with Him. I did not know that the Bible says these things. I tell her that is what Hindus believe, too. But she is all fired up with the Bible, and she knows where to find what she wants to draw attention to. Then she tells me that this world is not our home. We are aliens here. Our real home is somewhere else. Where? I ask. In heaven with God, of course.

She tells me that she has a ten-year-old son, that he is very lovable. I sense detachment in her comments about her son. Yet her conviction about the words in the Bible and her faith are beautiful. That makes her look beautiful, too. And she has set me thinking about what home really means.

For almost 50 years I called my parents’ house my home. In 1953 I left that home, 14 Saket in the city of Meerut in Northern India, to train to be a fighter pilot. During my long Air Force career I lived in fifteen different bases and cities in India and for two years in Iraq. At each of these places, I had my own Air Force-allotted house. However, until 2003 when my father died (Mother died in 1999), I thought of my parents’ house as my home. I returned to it time and again during that period of 50 years, first as a bachelor, then with my wife, and later with my children.

The house at 14 Saket became a home for all my siblings and all their children as well. We could go there anytime and stay as long as we wished. My parents gave everything they had--their love, their attention, their possessions, their time, and their money--to make all of us feel happy and loved. Every child of every sibling of mine felt at home at 14 Saket. My cousins and their children, too, felt it was a place where they would be welcomed. Whenever any of us, the children and grandchildren of my parents, needed to list our permanent address, we would, without hesitation, give the address as 14 Saket. And that is my permanent address in the Air Force records today.

I remember the day in 1952 when my father and I, the eldest of his sons, stood at the corner of the lot that Father had purchased in Saket and watched the mason put down the first brick to lay the foundation. The house got constructed in phases. We moved into the house before it could be completed, as Father could not afford to pay rent on the apartment in which we lived and pay for the construction of the house at the same time. The floors were still not finished. For some time we did not even have electricity. Into this house my parents moved with seven children: the youngest was only a few months old.

On receiving my commission in 1957 at the age of 19 as a gazetted officer in the Indian Air Force, I was the first child of my parents to earn an income. For the next seven years my father received a money order from me every month to help pay off his debts and to provide for the growing needs of the family. As my other brothers grew up and took employment, they too started contributing. Later our two sisters were married off. Following the Indian tradition, our parents gave extensive presents (some call it dowry) to their daughters to make it easy for their husbands to start a home. We all contributed. 14 Saket remained a home for my sisters, too. The whole family pulled together to make the house a place of laughter, love, security and comfort.

The house at 14 Saket stopped being a home when my father’s spirit departed and his body merged with dust. The house was taken over at last by one of my younger brothers, Sunil, who lives there with his wife. The rest of us had left home long ago, following our respective professions.

Sunil was two years old when I stood with my father watching workers lay the foundation. He continued to live with my parents from the time he was born. He grew up, went to medical school, married and started his practice all in the same town and in the same neighborhood. His marriage was arranged with a local girl who was a teacher in the local college, and Sunil worked as an on-call anesthetist at a local nursing home, only 100 yards from 14 Saket.

Whenever we visited the family home, he was always there, having gradually apportioned a large part of the house to himself and his family. This caused frustration to my parents who had to accommodate him. Yet characteristically they absorbed all personal discomforts and allowed Sunil to do as he pleased. As my parents grew old, they saw their eldest son migrate to the USA and their other sons scatter all over India. They also saw signs of future conflicts about inheritance rights. But my father, as a thoroughly moral person, having high ethical values, refused to entertain the thought that any of his sons would want to grab the rights of his own brothers.

By the time my mother and then my father died, my brother had identified himself so thoroughly with the house that he resisted attempts to enforce the will my father left, giving equal rights to the house at 14 Saket to his five sons. Thus the house is now not only not a home to the rest of us , but it is a cause for rupture of relations between Sunil and the rest of my father’s children.

The house still stands as a monument to the old days. It has a beautiful garden tended to by Sunil’s wife and gardeners. It has a fresh coat of paint and is alive to the sounds and laughter of Sunil’s friends. But not one of us, the other children of my parents, goes there any more. Houses do not make homes. It is the spirit of those who live in the houses that makes them homes.

Today I live with my daughter Ashima in her house here in the USA. She even says that this is my house and that they (my daughter and her family) are living with my wife and me. Ashima has given me another home. I do not miss 14 Saket that much. After a recent three-week trip to Europe, as I was flying back to the United States, I felt for the first time fully that I was going home. The USA is my home now, not only because I have lived here for the past twelve years, but also because I have found many American and Indian friends here who have enriched my life.

In many ways my daughter is like my parents. William Wordsworth was right when he said, “the Child is the father of the Man.” In my case that is more than a metaphor. Home is where love is. And my final home is perhaps even lovelier than my first one.

According to the Korean lady interpreting the Christian Bible, and according to Hindu teachings as well, my house in Lawrenceville, Georgia, is not my final home, of course. But it is the one in which I live now and receive much love and affection. Another of my brothers, Anil, came on a visit last year. As he was leaving, he told me how happy he was to have come. He felt so much warmth and love here that he thought14 Saket had moved to Lawrenceville.