Dear Home, Where are You?
Hostel food, diverse people, new language, and culture shock– Manavi Goyal interacts with students at her hostel to find a home away from home.
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I was born in the small town of Kurseong and received my education there in a convent school. My dad owns a bookstore—the official supplier of stationery to my school. My father would take my brother and me to other schools as well. That helped socialise us.
But then Kurseong is a small town where everyone knows everyone and because of this, I had many friends. I went to Siliguri for my undergraduate studies. I was staying as a paying guest for the first time. I was sharing a room with two girls from the same college. Surprisingly, Ayesha, my roommate, was a Muslim, Sweta was a Christian and I was Hindu. We had a great time together, we shared our culture and exchanged our thoughts. Ayesha taught me verses of Namaz, and Sweta read verses from the Bible. That PG had a school for girls. It was run by a widow, and she loved all of us like her children. She was a Marwadi too. So, I had zero problems with regard to food, as we got similar kinds of dishes that mom made back at home. We ate momo and thukpa at home and there was momo and thukpa in Siliguri. Siliguri is just an hour away from Kurseong, So I met my parents almost every week. The pandemic happened during the second year of my course and I went back home.
Straight after the pandemic ended I shifted to Mumbai for my higher education. Here, people did not sleep. Everything was fast, but back at home, life was slow. In Mumbai, I did not find food of the same kind that I had earlier. It took a lot of time, as well as trial and error with different foods to develop a taste for them. There was no thukpa for one. I found momo, but it tasted like a horrible copy of what I had at home. And the world was suddenly huge, much larger than it had ever been before. But perhaps that early socialisation helped, for I made friends among the other exiles in the college.
One of my friends in the art department of Sophia Polytechnic, Jeslin was in Kuwait for years and had to come to Kerala unexpectedly with her family. As there was no scope to build an art career in Kerala, she then moved to Mumbai for a better future.
Within a year she moved to New York. It was a tough time for her as a child to adjust to that environment, but eventually, she got used to it. “There were people belonging to many religions and ethnicities So you find Christians, Muslims. People from different countries - Spanish, and Chinese. Where I used to live was Flushing, Queens. You’ll find all the Asian people over there. I was friends with many Chinese and Spanish people, since we didn’t live in Manhattan, I didn’t have any white people as my friends,” says Nishtha.
Jeslin says, “So, I did my schooling in Kuwait. I used to be in a group of 4 girls. But then this Pakistani dude, a friend I made was very unexpected. I remember in the class I used to be that kind who used to always sit on the first bench, but what happened was, the teacher told me to sit behind. This boy was there who was very naughty and who had ink in his face because he was doing something to that pen. And, I thought this dude is very irritating and I cannot sit over here.” She had just started being friends with her Pakistani friend, but she had to move to Kerala soon for her studies from class 7 to high school. She says, “I was not prepared for anything, I had a language barrier issue. The thing is I knew how to talk in Malayalam, but I did not know how to write the script or read the script. I took four to five years to learn the language properly.” She mentions that she could hardly pass because of the language, but her friends there who lived nearby helped her through, and in the final year she got through all the subjects.
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Jeslin faced language difficulties again when she moved to Mumbai from Kerala. She made a lot of friends in Mumbai too. She said, “The kind of friends I have are more professional-related people that I hang out with. But then it is good to be an all-rounder person, so in the hostel, I have friends who are not connected to my profession.” She mentions that when she thinks about her friendships in all stages, she finds her Pakistani friend the best of all. She doesn't know if he is still in Kuwait or is back in his country. She does not know if she will ever go back to Kuwait in search of him but he is that friend, whose friendship she will always cherish.
Whereas, Nishtha, one of my friends in the final year of economics at Sophia College, who was born in Bihar shifted to Kolkata when she was 7 years old.
“I started my pre-school in Kolkata, and I studied there till the third grade. It was a good experience. The people over there were very nice. The food and the climate are nice as well. I didn't have that many friends over there, okay, I had three to four friends which I don’t even remember. And I have no contact with them. After that, we lived in Kolkata for 5 years, and then we moved to Mumbai,” says Nishtha.
Nishtha moved back to Mumbai when she was in 9th grade. She found Indian education to be very different and faced difficulties in various subjects. She says, “In English, we study a textbook and we learn the question and answer of the textbook, but in New York, it wasn’t like that. You get a passage, you have to study the passage at that time and then answer the questions. You have to understand the passage to write the answers. But over here I remember in 9th grade we only used to have textbook English, and the question answers teachers would give themselves. So we’re not using our brain to answer that.”
I am trying to find warmth and love in Mumbai’s food, as to me warmth and love is home, nothing else really matters. To Jeslin it’s the place she looks for wherever she goes and the people who stay connected to her despite distances. To Nishtha, home means safety, love, affection, and a place that is foundational to learning how to deal with greater responsibility. To all of us home is a place we seek, home is a place we’d be the happiest to find.
To all of us home is a place we seek, home is a place we’d be the happiest to find.