At Home
Amy Hill
By Gita Chadha, Mumbai, India
Usually, in pre-lockdown times, I leave home for work at 10 a.m. and get back at 7 p.m. I do not enjoy leaving home, even though I love my work and I like my workplace. I love to get home. I have navigated this daily dilemma of my inner world in all the years of my ‘productive life’. To my friends, I am a home bird. I am most at ease when ‘at home’. My strongest longings are for home. Being from a family of displaced people that faced the partition of India in 1947, the idea of home became central to my family’s collective sense of safety and belonging. For me, it became a motif of the will to reconstruct life after the trauma and pain of losing home. That’s what I reckon. My parents built a home from scratch. It was a labor of love. My home, with husband and child, is a labor of love too. We built every object, every gesture, every relationship with utmost passion and intensity. From almost nothing, except a desire for togetherness. To something more than a desire for togetherness. The warmth of home, filled with the love and laughter of kin families, made families and friends became sacred. Out of the ordinary. Hence, when the COVID-19 stay- at-home order came, I should have been delighted. Especially because my 25 year old daughter came home too. I should have naturally found peace and joy.
And yet, that has not happened. I find myself tense. Not only because of the demands of household work along with the pressures of ‘work from home’ but also because of the larger questions of social justice that the lockdown has brought to the fore. What happens to people who do not have a home, how do they stay-at-home? What about people whose home is hellish, how will they stay at home? What happens to work that cannot be done from home, what happens to that work? Being a sociologist and a feminist, my first worry on ‘stay- at-home’ was about its consequences on women. Home, as we all know, is not a safe haven for many women across class, caste, ethnicity and religion. It is often a site of violence and oppression. I am thinking of my many girl students who come to university as a refuge from oppressive homes. I am thinking of our domestic workers who face violence at home on a daily basis. Sure enough, within days the data on increased violence against women begins to pour in. My personal helplessness grows. Simultaneously, news of thousands of migrant workers and homeless people who have lost their livelihood - and are struggling for shelter - makes me choke in dumbfounded rage. News of people walking for days to reach the safety of their village homes is heart breaking. To add to this is the disturbing communalization of the COVID discourse and the mindless, vulgar use of religion by the regime to give ‘hope’ instead of relief to the masses. I feel the space for genuine faith and prayer getting shrunk in this context.
All this becomes a trigger for my subconscious anxieties about the ‘loss of home’.
Donating to people’s groups and volunteering to work for COVID prevention in one’s already gated neighborhood seem like a drop in the ocean that might allow one to sleep at night, in privilege. But sleep does not come, not with ease.
The day comes with an onslaught of questions and ends with a whiplash of answers. So much to think, so much to absorb, so much to do, so much to write. Is it nature’s nemesis, really? Is it god’s wrath, really? Is it ‘our’ doing, really? Is it the fault of governments, really? Is social distancing going to keep us safe and healthy, really? Is the environment healing, really? Are people healing, really? Will the virus go away with bells and candles, really? Clearly, I pick answers I like. And keep moving and adapting, in a state of inertia.
In the first weeks of the lockdown, I struggled to find my answer to the question: how are you? Now I have the correct words, the appropriate pitch for an answer: I am at home, privileged and disturbed. Deeply disturbed. Because my breath is trapped by the unbearable pain of a world gone so wrong. How then can the home stay safe, I wonder. As I wait for herd immunity and the vaccine to be developed, I face the fragility of our lives. I face the fragility of my home. I face the fragility of all homes. And yet, I hope, pray and believe that we will reconstruct ‘homes’, to anchor ourselves in this ‘world- home’ to many species, to many forms of life.