Other than my actual house, there is only one place in the world that truly feels like home to me, my Nani ma’s (grandmother’s) house, nestled in a town at the foothills of the Shivalik mountains in North India. This makes it sound like a really small and isolated town. I can promise you it’s not. It’s a suburb just outside of a larger metroplex, Chandigarh, with a population of about 315,000 people within 800 square kilometers. It’s almost worse than being from a small town in the American South, everyone is forced up in everyone else’s business. There’s also a culture of people watching. Some families will set up plastic chairs on their front driveways in the evening and watch as people, cows, vendors, and cars stroll by. They sip on chai and discuss their day while staring you down as you walk across the street into your own house. I’m used to this though. Sometimes I participate in it myself.
My purpose of providing this long segue is to contextualize the time and place in which my Nani’s house presides. It’s a small house in the center of a town that never seems to end. Houses upon houses upon houses. There is no such thing as a side yard. Houses are built right next to — or rather built on — each other, town house style.
Since I was five years old, I’ve been visiting her and my Nana ji (grandfather) for a month every year, during which time I do absolutely nothing but eat, sleep, and vegetate. Nothing seems to change around here — the same baby-pink painted walls, the same carved wooden doors, the occasional chip of paint revealing where a leaky pipe used to be. The childhood toys and stuffed animals of mine, my sister’s, our cousins’, and our parents’ adorn the living room. If you stare too long at them they start staring back — wait, what did Nietzsche say about the abyss looking at you again? I forgot. He might have visited my Nani’s house when writing “Beyond Good and Evil.”
I’m going to go back to talking about the inner appearance of her house now. It’s anything but quiet here. Every second is filled with a new stimulant: car horns, street vendors biking through the streets begging onlookers via a megaphone to buy their potatoes, Hindu prayers of some kind playing inside or outside the house, the ringing of bells. Cows mooing. India is gloriously loud and overstimulating and maximalist and everything but peace and quiet.
My maternal side of the family are generational woodworkers. Every table, chair, dresser, almirah, and door is custom carved by someone in the family, probably my mother’s cousins and uncles. My mom recounts the halcyon days of her childhood when she lived in an officer’s colony in northern Haryana. My Nana ji was a senior officer at a state-owned public sector enterprise in India. Business placard, gala awards, and memorabilia line every shelf and table of the house. The inside of the house is filled with relics of a time past. The dining table lined with chairs my mother used to sit on as a child (carefully carved mahogany, wicker seats), my great grandmother’s cotton spinning wheel (on display in the living room), the phulkari printed cushions and sofa covers (glorified dust covers for the wooden sofas). Memorabilia from my aunts and cousins living here and abroad line the crockery rack — souvenirs from Singapore and Rameshwar and Canada and the United States and every place her three daughters have settled abroad and found success and marital bliss in.
Everything I’ve ever brought and forgotten here is stored in my room, the guest room, in the almirah carefully wrapped and placed for my next visit. Every extra tube of toothpaste, roll of toilet paper, pen, coloring book, even the scissors I brought to work on my fourth grade summer homework all still exist here. Possibly everything I’ve ever consumed in India is here. The Cetaphil facewash bottle I bought five summers ago I found neatly tucked away in the bathroom cupboard. My stuffed puppy, Licky-Looky, stares back at me from the living room end table. Old workbooks, coloring pages, crafts, and even a bottle of Welch’s squeezable jam from 2016 is still in the fridge — albeit serving a different purpose now. The seven-roomed house is preserved to perfection like a museum. The thought of seeing everything I have ever consumed, thrown away, and used appear before me at once terrifies me. Sometimes coming here terrifies me.
For the aforementioned reasons, my Nani’s house is a liminal space. For me, at least. Time seems to pause here. No matter how long I stay, it still feels like a transitory space. We come here before our next big “thing”: before heading up north to the mountains in Himachal, or down south for sightseeing, or Delhi for travel. Sure, we visit India with the primary aim of visiting my grandparents, but I always seem to be waiting for what’s next. The next adventure. Where to next, mom? Pilgrimage? An ashram? An impromptu trip meeting some relative on the maternal side of the paternal side of the maternal side of my family whom I’ve never met before? Perhaps it’s my American/capitalist/colonial mindset to derive productivity and measurable outcomes from everything I do. I should stop doing that. But I keep thinking of my life back home and my friends and Swarthmore and everything I’m missing out on. At Swarthmore, I was waiting until the summer would start and I’d be back in India. In India, I’m waiting until summer ends and I get back to Swarthmore. I find myself looking, prowling, finding the next thing.
Anyways, I watched “Backrooms” on my flight from Dallas to Delhi. I found it to be a dull, try-hard thriller that had a vague ending for no other purpose than feigning artistry. But it reminded me of my Nani’s house in a way. Everything I’ve ever felt, thought, and experienced physically exists in the realm of my memory. Long summers spent contemplating, studying, playing, doing, all in this house. Like “Backrooms,” I like to think of my Nani’s house as a physical manifestation of my subconscious. Much more utopian than the film, yet still, being here is like spending time climbing around my own mind. There’s not much to do but sit and think.
Think, think, think. Every forgotten memory, object, era of my life resurfaces here.
Have you seen those weird liminal YouTube Shorts? The ones where nostalgic yet eerie music plays in the background and you’re offered to choose between one of the following spaces to spend the rest of eternity in: 1) endless waterpark, 2) abandoned mall, 3) early 2000’s office building full of never-ending cubicles or, 4) endless suburbia — you can visit the houses for food and shelter, but some are homes to mysterious entities.
It’s like that, kind of. But joyful. Utopian even. My Nani maintains a side garden brimming with mango trees and guava plants and herbs and cacti and roses and touch-me-nots and birds and caterpillars and locusts. There’s sunlight and fresh-cut fruits and the sound of hushed prayers coming from the next room and the ringing of the prayer bell, sometimes the smell of incense. There’s my Nana ji watching WhatsApp videos on full volume and my mom complaining and laughing and Nani fussing about food and laundry. There’s stray dogs outside and the cows mooing and eating and prancing around. Their skin involuntarily twitches so as to deter flies and pests from nesting in. After a few seconds they come back anyway.
It’s summer. Time, basically, doesn’t exist. It’s frozen. Or, maybe it’s melted into a liquid. Moldable, freezable, pourable, malleable. Until it hardens on the last day of summer. It cannot be changed then. But what if summer never ended? I can spend as much or as little time as I want here. The question is, how long do I want to spend in my own mind? Is it a pleasant place to be?
My Nani happens to be the favorite person of my favorite person, my mom. By extension, this makes her one of my favorite people. Everything I find annoying in my mom I find admirable in her.
She really likes talking to herself. So much so that she narrates every task she’s doing and every thought she’s thinking. She finds whimsy in the mundane. Washing dishes out back, doing laundry by hand, spending hours collecting and processing produce for a single meal, evening prayers in Puja Room.
A trip to the market becomes an hour-long recap of every single thing that happened, every sensation she felt, everything that irked her, and every item she bought. It’s a wondrous thing.
It’s a wondrous thing for a person like me who hates the sound of silence. (With the exception of the Simon & Garfunkel song. It was one of my first ever CDs. I love Paul Simon almost as much as Alissa Lopes ’29).
My mom and I like to joke that my Nani is like a live podcast. Endless commentary on anything you can imagine. A never-ending stream of consciousness narration, spoken in a mix of Hindi and Punjabi.
Her voice travels around the house rehashing events of time past or explaining family artifacts while she dusts them, like an automated audio guide explaining to you what you’re looking at as you walk along the never-ending hallways of a museum.
I really like museums. Maybe that’s why Nani’s house feels like home. But there’s only so much time you can spend reflecting on the past, living in your old memories, before you start to become complacent. I can stay here as long as I want, but should I? I’m taking a gap semester off from Swarthmore. To travel, see family, hopefully find myself before I’m thrown back into the madness.
Yet, I can’t seem to stop thinking about my best friends and the little universe I created for myself at this tiny liberal arts college town in Pennsylvania nestled in a town just 30 minutes away from Philadelphia.
What is [redacted] doing right now, in her dorm? How are her classes going? Is she at Hobbs with [redacted] right now? I wish I was there. I wish we could laugh together until our stomachs ache and we get a knock on our dorm room door from public safety with a noise complaint. I wish we could sit on Trotter — I mean Old Science — I mean Edley-Morgan Lawn and laugh about nothing. I wish we could go to Hobbs to get absolutely no work accomplished. I wish we could get Kohlberg Indian and I give you the paneer I don’t want to eat on the suspiciously compostable plastic lid Swarthmore packages their catered food in. I wish I could talk about the newest edition of The Phoenix with you. I wish I had someone to talk to about my climate anxiety. I wish I had someone to Uber Eats Taco Bell with and drag to club events that I don’t want to go alone to. I wish we could stomp our way through Heart and Soul’d and the Trinity Church Thrift looking for some thrift gold and I watch as you end up leaving with three full bags and me one. You’re much better at thrifting than me.
I wish, I wish, I wish.
I wish I could be there with you.
I’m in my favorite place, my favorite universe. But, what about the universe I left behind? What about the universe with you in it?
I have the privilege of a lifetime to understand myself better, to understand the world better, to do better. I will never have this opportunity ever again. Why can’t I enjoy it, relish it, be in the present?
It’s hard to enjoy the present when the present is the past.
How I wish you were here.
