The home we want, the home we make

Christmas Eve, 2014. Photo by Nalin Bhutt

It's pretty obvious to say that travel has a way of broadening our souls and imaginations. Still under the fog of jet lag that has settled over me, not unlike the fog we experienced traveling the well-worn 1,000-year-old highway between Delhi and Nalin's family's home in the epic city of Kurukshetra, Haryana, I'm full of thoughts both muddled and clear about how this trip has expanded our hearts and minds. First off, let me just say that kids are pretty amazing when it comes to the stress of travel. Other than a well-deserved melt-down in a much-too-long immigration line in Minneapolis at the tail-end of our journey back home (Nooa saying all along, "I hate Minneapolis" — please don't take it personally, my Minnesota friends), all three, even the nearly 2-year-old managed to drag their little, tired bodies from hotel to airport to airplane, repeat, repeat again. They ran eagerly to "ride" the moving walkways in each and every airport, even when sleep was pulling on their eyelids so heavy and persistent. And now we are home. One week. One blissful week of comfortable beds and newly clean laundry and home-cooked food. And how we miss just about everything. 

They always say, "Home is where the heart is," and yet for many who have found themselves living in that space between two homes, two countries, two lives, this is, perhaps, a more complicated proposition. We've had the distinct privilege of being able to travel to visit family in India and, at the same time, the clear disadvantage of not being able to see those same loved ones that often... way too much time that passes between embraces, meals, and chats over chai. Too many inches grown or wrinkles surfaced between those face-to-face meetings. We've chosen a home together away from both of our families (much farther from Nalin's), and that was mainly because we wanted to live in a big city and sow our oats, so to speak, in a more cosmopolitan environment; however, that has its advantages and disadvantages of course. It's home, but does it have all of our heart? 

There is an Indonesian folktale told between the pages of Tara Books' "The Great Race," by Nathan Kumar Scott and Jagdish Chitara, which we bought in a beautiful little shop called The Lightroom in Bangalore. In the tale, Kanchil the mouse deer, fastest animal in the forest, challenges all the other animals in the forest to a race. None of the animals takes him up on this, save a small snail named Pelan. In two races to come, Pelan beats Kanchil to the astonishment of everyone in the forest. As it turns out, Pelan has a twin brother who slyly waits at the finish line for Kanchil to speedily arrive. And perhaps that is what we all want, right — a doppelgänger who allows us to exist in two places at once. Two identities, two homes. As it turns out, in all its beauty and failings, the identities we form can, in fact, transcend the boundaries of our chosen places. The world as we have known it in the past continues to evolve, and our worlds continue to grow ever closer to one another.  The home we make can be the home we want, if we see it beyond the conventional meaning or idea. After all, the heart doesn't have to be a lonely hunter. There is room and room to grow.