an introduction; finding home in art

It’s monsoon in Mumbai. This year’s season has been moody, with long strings of hot dry days woven in between the wet ones. But when the rain does fall it’s torrential like always, and I see people on motorbikes with their raincoats glued hard to their bodies under the weight of the water pouring down, trousers and socks soaked a muddy brown. It’s hard to romanticize the rain in this city; damp clothes are the least of the trouble it brings. We have never known how to manage our own jungle-appropriate weather. 

Still, there is a pleasanter aspect to the rain; finally there’s a nip in the air, an opaque heaviness outside that coaxes us inside, the grey-blue light softening everything within. Lucky people are told to take a break from school, to work from home, our equivalent of the western snow day. The rain here begets us to sit at home and think.

I’ve found myself thinking a lot about home lately, and what it means to feel at home, in a deeper sense than being at home in a certain place. I recently moved back home to Mumbai after living in Vancouver for five years, a shift that triggered some of this thinking. I’m in my childhood home surrounded by family, a few amazing old friends, the world that moulded me. Unsurprisingly, I no longer fit that mould. The past and the present have collided, my sense of who I am and what is home is has shifted.

What does it mean to feel at home? Sitting between my parents on the couch watching a sitcom, sprinkling cinnamon into my coffee in the mug I use everyday, having long wine-soaked conversations with my best friends, feeling the morning sun on my shoulders in Vancouver, reading Jane Austen and PG Wodehouse, calling up my grandmother, putting my makeup on for a night out, walking around the shopping malls in Mumbai, getting in the zone writing an essay, practicing playing the piano, helping a stranger out. 

 I’ve always derived a deep homey feeling from these moments. They brought comfort and peace, and they also helped me recognize myself. This is me, these are the things I do, these are the things I want myself to keep doing. This is where I feel at home. And my sense of self grows stronger, I’m a little bit more comfortable and a little bit more confident. If the world and other people don’t always mirror back what I expect to see, I’m not quite so shaken.  

But this list of things isn’t exhaustive nor static, and some ways in which I felt at home changed with my moves to and fro Canada. This is both good and bad; university life abroad made me grow up rapidly, and feel at home in situations that would have had me running scared if I’d stayed in Mumbai. But some good old ways were also lost. 

But this monsoon has brought a rediscovery of the old, as I sat at home pondering home, blanketed by the rain. Rain has a very characteristic way of falling in Mumbai, it’s voluminous jungle rain, nothing like Vancouver’s polite, thinly cold showers. It’s a rain I haven’t felt in several years, and it’s been my Proust moment, transporting me back in time, but instead of a madeleine dipped in tea, it’s the grey light and petrichor. I feel old ways of being at home reaching back from the past and meshing with the present, and one manifestation of this is art. 

I’ve never been a very creative artist. As a teenager, I enjoyed sketching still life and faces, but it was always more therapeutic for me than a creative outlet. I liked to feel myself replicate the object in front of me on paper, all my focus zeroed in on just the texture of a lip or the diffusion of light through the stem of a wine-glass, and to be able to hold my achievement in my hand and show it to people who could immediately see and understand and appreciate it. That’s not so easy to do with writing, which was the area in which I felt creativity. My mother is an extremely talented artist, and I have many memories of sitting with her as a child on rainy monsoon days where we were confined to the house, watching her work deftly at her easel. 

I also enjoyed reading about art and artists; I admired their ability to express a thought, a feeling, a perspective in a way that was solid and beautiful and succinctly encapsulated. That seems a little harder to do through writing. With a work of art, all it can take is one look to be made to feel something the artist felt and to have seen something through their eyes, and thus to have had a glimpse into their psyche, the psyche of someone you might never have otherwise known at all. This also brings me to another facet of feeling at home — to have made an impact on the world, to have yourself felt in the world’s consciousness and culture. Do people who have not done that, those who depart believing themselves soon forgotten in the larger scheme of things, get to feel as at home in the world? 

So lately I have been exploring art once again, learning about old artists and works and dusting off my old sketchbooks. And as I do so, I feel a little bit more at home. It’s so nice to pick up certain pieces of yourself that you had accidentally discarded along the way. We are constantly growing, chipping away, morphing, and growing again.

So I’m beginning a new set of essays, essays diving into my favourite artists and paintings. I’m writing about art that makes me feel and think, and allows me to move through a wider expanse of the world, wherever that takes me, as I look into the lived experiences of these artists, and how they made the world their home.