The Thin Line that Separates ‘Home in London’ from ‘London as Home’
- Shayeri Bhattacharyya
- 4 hours ago
- 5 min read
Ma calls me and shows me around the Pujo pavilion. It is a bright end of September morning, and it is Durga Pujo back home in West Bengal, India, the time when the defeat of the Evil by the Divine Feminine is celebrated with pomp and glory over five festive days. My parents have decked up in the brightest of colours for the morning worship of the Goddess. My nine year old brother is hastily looking for his friend amidst the huge crowd of festive merry-making, and the only octogenarian member of my family is reeling in the memory of the yesteryears from behind the veil of grandmotherly nostalgia.
I try to soak in every bit of the familiarity from the other side of this timed video call. My eyes are still half-shut, my head still heavy from not having had my morning coffee yet. It’s been less than ten days since I moved to London. Class starts tomorrow. Am I excited? Hell yes. Am I nervous? Also hell yes. The dream of being in London is no longer unfulfilled now. But why does nobody prepare you for the insane amount of overwhelm this city throws at your face, much like the strong gusts of wind that arrive unannounced on a random mid-week dusk?
On my last call of the day with Ma, I hear from miles away about the family gathering on the floor, as is customary across Bengali households, and chat over the steam and smell of masala chai and vegetable croquettes. I smile, and try to make do with the last piece of gulab jamun tucked at a corner in my fridge. My parents go off to sleep in India and I prepare to heat up my oat milk for my evening coffee. The milk tastes so much better here, but my coffee cup feels empty without the sound of my father’s occasional humming or my little brother’s playful banter coming from the next room. Living alone is difficult, but living miles away during festivals feels interminably painful.
The first day of class was a haphazard mix of several emotions. It felt lonely to not know more than two familiar faces, it felt unfamiliar to be surrounded by people who did not speak my mother tongue. London is famed for its consistent difficulty of making friends, but it should also be recognised for enabling the most random of ways in which you end up making connections for life. I remember talking to a girl from India about a sim card issue right before I moved. We planned on meeting at The Shack for a quick coffee, and bonded so much over the discovery of Indian vegetables in Tesco and other corner shops. Our brief but genuine stretch of bonding ended with making plans for Indian vegetable shopping the next time.
The campus felt oddly unfamiliar, and the benches in front of Bush House SE Wing felt somewhat comforting, and in the midst of this entire hullabaloo of familiarising with the unfamiliar, an unprecedented phone call made its way to make things a lot easier and a little closer to making a home out of the melodramatic city that is London.
I spent my first Durga Pujo in London with one known face and several other unknown ones. My super-senior from my university in India was kind enough to invite me to spend Pujo with them. It was the first time I wore my dream sartorial combination of black saree and black overcoat and walked about the streets of London. It was since this day - this day, when I heard the Bengali instrument of dhaak playing in a temple in London, when I offered my prayers to the Goddess without my parents behind me or my brother tearing the flowers away in front of me, and when I changed my Facebook profile picture with a Pujo photo in a land that was not Bengal - that London started to feel slightly like home to me. Ever since then, walking out of T2 at Heathrow has been a little less confusing, a little less scary, and a lot more reassuring.
I now spend every festival in London with friends I have found at King’s who speak my mother tongue. I deck up in my favourite home attire, smile twice as much if I find the sun greeting me on such festive weekends, and gorge on food from my homeland with maximised nostalgia. I send my parents pictures, and scrutinise theirs to tell how they could have clicked each other better. I whimper a bit at the sight of all the food that I am forced to miss, but make do with counting days to my next journey back home for my fair share of days bereft of grocery confusion and TFL rush hour expenses.
Celebration gains a character of its own when you push yourself to resignify the unfamiliar, and succeed in doing so. Nowadays, I pat myself on the back if I can successfully make it to the cornermost classroom at the Maughan Library without getting lost. I crib about the deadly wind by meeting with my girlfriends and talking about everything under the sun while our laptop screens stare at us. I enjoy my four minute walk to my Tuesday class via the Embankment Gardens without sparing a thought for the rain that just refuses to stop. I buy yellow flowers from Sunday markets and smile at the uncountable number of dogs encountered on my walk back home. I try to make the most of it all, despite the sun that refuses to shine and the rain that refuses to leave and the weekly readings that refuse to end and the seasonal depression that refuses to let me be. I try to make a festival out of the three minutes of sunlight, the increasing amount of daylight every day, the pub discovered on a rainy Thursday, the coffee shop frequented with friends after every Friday class. In these unending attempts of finding even a sliver of what home feels like, I end up realising how London has eased herself and her boundaries too, and in so many oft-unnoticeable ways, tried her best to help me make a home out of herself, and out of myself in this still-new city in the last five months.
This write-up is an ode to the dozens of daily sacrifices that go unnamed and, often, even unrealised for the dreams that we finally get to make our reality. I am writing this now sitting in my neighbourhood cafe as my parents are dining in yet another family gathering. Very soon, I will walk back home and again begin to worry about a whole week’s breakfast in no time. And yet I know that when I will accidentally catch a glimpse of the yellow flowers on my windowsill again before going to bed at night, I will subconsciously await yet another day of oat flat whites and neighbourhood walks and the flowers starting to bloom in the porches, and realise all over again how, in ways that I am yet to give any name to, London has finally started to feel like a comforting hug at the end of yet another cloudy, rain-soaked day.
All photography courtesy of Shayeri Bhattacharyya, article author
Edited by Hania Ahmed, Creative Editor
