WHAT IS HOME? ON BELONGING, MEMORY, AND THE FEELING WE CARRY WITHIN US.

WELLNESS CURATED BY ANSHU BAHANDA

What is home? Is it a place? Is it people? Is it a feeling? I have been asking myself this question for a long time now. As you know, I have been travelling a lot this past year. That is just how my life has turned out. A suitcase here, a different pillow there, a new time zone before my body has adjusted to the last one. London, Dubai, New York, New Delhi, and so many cities in between. Prague, Boston, Bangkok, Lagos, Colombo, Indore, and all the airport lounges that connect them. When you live like this, the question stops being poetic. It becomes practical. Where do I belong when I belong in so many places at once?

A PAVILION THAT ASKED THE SAME QUESTION

A few months after I started talking about home, I came across the India Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Its title stopped me. Geographies of Distance, remembering home. The curator, a wise and brilliant friend, Dr Amin Jaffer, was born in Africa, raised across cultures, and is Indian at heart. He knows something about carrying home inside you, because for him it was never just one address. His inspiration was a piece by the artist Sumakshi Singh, an embroidered reconstruction of her family home in New Delhi, a house since demolished. The walls are gone. And yet, stitch by stitch, she rebuilds it from thread and memory. The house no longer exists. The home does. Across the pavilion, five artists explore the idea of home, in Dr Jaffer's words, "through material, memory and transformation," using thread, soil and bamboo. He wanted to reflect "a sense of continuity within change." If you have ever moved cities, lost a parent, or woken in a hotel room not knowing for a second where you are, you will understand. Everything changes. Something stays.

WHAT MY TRAVELLING TAUGHT ME

Here is what this last year has taught me, and it is a very important life lesson. Home is a feeling you carry inside you. It is a feeling of belonging. A feeling of being exactly where you are meant to be. A feeling of peace and grounding. That feeling can be triggered by almost anything. A place. A house. Family. A particular person. A certain food. Mountains, oceans, forests. It really does not matter what the trigger is. The trigger is only the doorway. Home is what you find when you walk through it. For me, that feeling is sometimes triggered by my cup of masala tea. I know how that sounds. But the rising steam, the cardamom and ginger, the first warm sip, and I am instantly somewhere else. I am in a kitchen in India. I am a child. I am safe. It does not matter if I am actually sitting in a hotel in New York or on a plane at thirty-five thousand feet. For those few minutes, I am home. I think Sumakshi Singh would understand. She rebuilt a house from thread. I rebuild mine from tea.

THE OUTSIDE IS A REFLECTION OF THE INSIDE

I will be honest with you. For years, I did not believe people when they told me that the outside is a reflection of the inside. It sounded like one of those things said on the last slide of a wellness talk. Nice, but not something you could prove. I have come to believe it now.

When I feel at home on the inside, the outside feels like home as well. The same hotel room that felt cold and anonymous one week feels welcoming the next. The same city that felt overwhelming suddenly feels like it is holding me. Nothing outside has changed. The only thing that has changed is what I am carrying within. It is the opposite of what we are usually taught. We spend so much of our lives trying to fix the outside so that we can finally feel at home. The right house, the right city, the right circumstances, the right people around us. We think that when everything is in place, we will finally feel settled. But what if it works the other way round? What if you create the feeling first, and the world begins to arrange itself around it? That is not a fantasy. It is what the artists in Venice are showing us in their own way. A home built from thread. A home remembered through soil and bamboo. These are homes that do not depend on walls. They live in the hands, the memory, the heart.

THE QUIET KIND OF BELONGING

There is something else I keep thinking about. The title of the Biennale itself, In Minor Keys. Minor keys are the softer, more tender notes in music. The ones that ache a little. The ones that make you stop and listen. I think home lives in the minor keys. It is rarely a grand announcement. It is the sound of a familiar voice on the phone. The smell of something cooking. The way the light falls on a particular wall at a particular hour. These are small things, easy to miss when we are rushing, and they are exactly the things we reach for when we are far from everything we know. When I am travelling and tired, it is never the grand moments that bring me back. It is the quiet ones. A soft word. A warm cup. A deep breath at the right moment. Perhaps that is why those humble materials in Venice feel so true. Thread. Soil. Bamboo. They remind us that belonging is made by hand, slowly, with attention.

HOME AS A PRACTICE

So, my aim is simple, though not easy. I am trying to create this feeling inside me as much as I can, one moment at a time. Not once a year on holiday. Not only when I am back in a familiar place. But in small, ordinary moments, wherever I happen to be. There are a few simple ways I practise this. I pause and take three slow breaths, feeling my feet on the ground. I make my masala tea and actually taste it, rather than drinking it while answering messages. I look for one thing in the room that feels familiar or beautiful and let my eyes rest there. I call someone I love, even for five minutes. And I ask myself quietly, am I here? Right now, am I truly here? None of this is dramatic. It is more like a stitch. One small, patient stitch at a time, until a house begins to appear. This is really the heart of what I teach and what I believe in. We spend so much energy searching for somewhere to land, when the landing place was always going to be within us. It is why I keep coming back to the idea of returning to yourself. Because if home is a feeling, then it is something you can return to anywhere, at any hour, no matter what is happening around you.

AN INVITATION

Maybe you are travelling too. Maybe you have moved countries, or left a home you loved, or lost one. Maybe you are sitting in the house you have lived in for thirty years and still feel a little homeless inside. Maybe you simply have not felt at peace in a long time. I would like to offer you the same question that the pavilion offered me. What is home for you? Is it a place? Is it people? Is it a feeling? And what is your cup of masala tea? What is the small, humble, ordinary thing that takes you back to yourself in seconds?

Find it. Keep it close. Use it often. Because wherever you go, however far the distance, you carry the geography with you. And if you can feel at home within yourself, you can feel at home anywhere.

With love, and a warm cup of tea, Anshu.