Sometimes I think I’m very delulu about my desire to have people in my house. Honestly, in my head, I think I am a very hosting-people person and want people home all the time. But my actions and choices over the last couple of years have told a different story.
I moved out of Bombay (and my parents’ home) to Bangalore in 2017. I was 26 years old at the time. My very first house was a beautiful 3BHK duplex in Cooke Town, which I shared with two flatmates. They were lovely people to share a home with. Me, not so much.
You see, I grew up in a joint family. And I lived in a BDD chawl in Mumbai that had public toilets. This combination created a very confusing and contrarian relationship to having people in my home as an adult. When you grow up with 9 people crammed into a small one-room kitchen house, you get used to the idea of having people in every nook of your house. But if that house is a chawl, you also worry about the public perception of your home because, no matter how much somebody loves you, nobody wants to use a public toilet. I didn’t.
You’d think when my parents moved to a slightly bigger home and our family system shifted from joint to semi-nuclear, this situation would change. But we moved to the suburbs of Bombay, far away from the culturally thriving areas of Bombay that I was desperate to be a part of as a teenager and young adult. It was (or at least I perceived it to be) too far away for anyone I wanted to bring home to commute to.
"Where do you live?" is a very loaded question to ask someone in Bombay. It's often asked innocuously, but answers to it come with unspoken social strata locators.
In Bombay, areas carry caste and class signalling. Even a kilometre’s distance within the same area can carry different social locations. For example, Bandra West carries the perception of being “cool,” with its 1000 food joints, bars, gig venues, media offices, culture venues, and old bylanes that cost a bomb to live in. Bandra East, however, carries several low-income colonies, sarkaari residencies, development complexes, union offices, and several major slum clusters like Behrampada and Indira Nagar.
Bombay has this way of visually showing where you come from, and where you constantly aspire to climb to. It crams the wealth of several enriching life experiences into a zip file of a few years. But it also really fucks with your sense of belonging if you don’t carry monetary capital and all that it ushers in.
After leaving Bombay, I yearned to become an entirely new person. And for me, that started with a home that was entirely of my own design. It made me realise just how rich my interiority, and my creative expression of said interiority, was. I became a DIY furniture and art master in no time. My bed was full of plants, art, bedsheets I hand-printed, furniture that reflected my taste in colours. But mostly, I thought of my home as an extension of belonging with my friends.
I invited everyone home. And I mean EVERYONE. I threw a Christmas party once that had (according to the only sober friend there) nearly 60 people. I didn’t know my house could even host 60 people. It was beautiful. And terrible (to my neighbours). I’ve had many Christmas parties since, but never one that wild.
Slowly, over the years, I hosted less and less. Not just parties, but also small gatherings of my people.
I moved into a new house 5 years ago, right in the middle of the pandemic. It soon became a sanctuary and, without conscious knowledge, I turned it into a fiercely protected sanctuary of restoration.
It’s a small space, so there isn’t room to host a lot of people. But I wonder, as someone gifted with interior organisation and space-making talent, whether I specifically and subconsciously designed it to keep people out.
Slowly, I started repeating habits from my Bombay days. I’d go out to meet people and into their homes, but have fewer and fewer people in mine.
I wonder if the lack of space reminded me of my tiny home in my chawl. I wonder if I’m ashamed of where I come from. I suspect I am.
Having a smaller home somehow became indicative of having lesser means and the shame of not being financially stable in my early 30s. There is something to dissect about my family’s relationship with failure and shame. I was the golden child who was expected to overperform and be paraded for my several chess, music, writing, and quizzing medals, after all. I think I internalised this as who I am supposed to be as an adult.
What a fun feeling to learn you’ve become your parents.
While talking to two of my closest friends recently, I realised that we’ve only hung out at their homes in recent memory. And not mine. I felt a strange pang of FOMO, but the hurt came not from their absence in my home, but from the realisation that I’ve walled myself up inside my house.
At some point, you can’t tell the difference between a sanctuary and a prison.
There is truth to the idea of social mobility allowing for more people in your house. If I had a separate room to go into, I imagine my friends would feel more comfortable just existing around me without the need to engage. My people absolutely love my home, my little green haven, but it’s so texturally, spatially, and emotionally mine that I understand why someone would not feel at home.
This blog is not a fault-finding mission. I think, in exploring my relationship with hosting and home, I’m discovering where I’m placing my attention.
It’s okay that I wanted a few years of just building a garden and burying myself in leaf and soil instead of flesh and bone. I do believe I completely overdid it with my hyper-hosting in my previous home, which I think came from the same place of wanting to reclaim some hard-fought space for myself. I just gave it the form of carving my selfhood through the lens of how comfortable other people felt in my house. To me, the logic was: if my home is an extension of me, then how comfortable someone I love feels here is a reflection of how much they love me and feel loved by me.
When you come from an environment and mindset of physical scarcity, you can end up placing a disproportionate amount of weight on how physicality dictates belonging.
The idea of having a small home with floor cushions indicated a future with fewer people to love me in smaller spaces.
This association assumes the needs, individuality, and intentions of the very people I want to feel comfortable in my home to be different than the ones they communicate. I completely overlooked the fact that my people have constantly chosen me through the many big and small homes I’ve lived in.
If, practically, making room to have more people in my house means learning to become more financially stable so I can have a bigger home in which people can just exist/brainrot around me as deeply-loved carcasses, then that can be a goal I work towards. But I don’t get to decide on behalf of my people that they don’t want to be in my house. If I want them home, then all I need to do is make the active choice to have them there.
What you pay attention to, grows.