Khwaabghar 🏠

Notes on living, leaving, and the spaces in between...

July marks a decade of me living alone. Ten years since I left the Nagpur – first Mumbai, then eight years in Bangalore, now everywhere and nowhere – everything all at once.

I came with two bags, and undercooked plans. Ten years of doing everything on my own. Ten years, three apartments, and now, another shift looming. The tape knows me better than most people. I’m still packing and unpacking. Still leaving. And still searching.

I hope you get to experience the joy of setting up your house in your early or mid-twenties like the thrill of choosing curtains without compromise, of deciding where the fairy lights go, just because.

I made every wall a moodboard, every dinner a solo date with myself. There’s a strange, soft power in building a space that’s entirely yours. Mess, music, memories and all. The 270924 incense sticks in my corner would nod.

I wouldn’t lie. My current address has seen more turmoil and turbulence than all of the flights combined. It’s as if the walls learned how to sigh. The kind of space where even the light feels like it’s grieving. A place that knows heartbreak by name and stores old tears in the grout between tiles. It tried to hold me as much as it could.

I remember writing in one of the stories in Orenda, named Cafuné: “For I am the one without strings, four walls but not limbs. For I am a home who wants to be a human, just to cafunè her to sleep.”

And now, I think maybe I’ve been both – the weary souvenir girl who needs the cafuné, and while the space is aching to be human.

I’ve lived in and out of suitcases more than I’ve lived inside drawers. Traveled endlessly: for work, for weddings, for some reason to not be still. Airports feel closer. (Joke is on me because I am based in Bangalore). But seriously, I know a few familiar faces, flight numbers and schedules, gates that give you the best view.

My pronouns now are window/seat. And for the longest time my bio’s had - ‘Window seat is my favourite abode.’ I guess the universe took it too seriously.

And my Wi-Fi is named Khwaabghar. Poetic, yes. I often jest that home is where the Wi-Fi connects automatically. Sometimes that’s my own. Sometimes it’s a friend’s flat where the chai is too sweet, the blanket smells like their dog, and yet, I sleep better than I have in weeks!

What is home, then? (as existential as the meaning of life)

Is it the scent of mogra in my mother’s hair or my father’s instructions? Is it smell of idli-sambhar or the taste of Indori jeeravan on pohe? The echo of old classics drifting through the courtyard? Or the childhood game of ghar-ghar, where two cushions were a castle and a dupatta could make you anyone, anywhere?

These days, home feels like a trick question. A riddle I wake up to and can’t forget by dusk.

Even Country roads, take me home... doesn’t know the pin location. Take me where, John Denver? To my first leaking hostel ceiling? To the version of me who believed home could be permanent? To someone’s arms that felt like a sanguine Sunday?

I don’t know.

But I do know this: I’ve survived and thrived a decade living alone. I’ve stitched together some kind of life with bubble wrap, heart, and laughter. I’ve made a home by living out loud; out of nothing more than courage and conviction. Nobody told us ghar ghar was a rehearsal for life, where friends disguised as family members. Yaar-parivaar much.

If I had to put it bluntly - we chase meaning like we chase closure, but (maybe) they’re the same thing: elusive, imagined, unfinished.

Well, I guess I am getting better at calling exits by gentler names.

Here’s to living in sentences - yours, mine, ours! :)

Writeously yours,
Shalaka Kulkarni