Some days ago, I put up a story of a picture of a Chicago street someone had sent me, and I wrote “Home” with a purple heart next to it. Akash replied almost instantly: “How is it possible that you consider Chicago home, a place you stayed in for just two years, whereas Mumbai—where you’ve lived for 28 years, where your family, cousins, friends, childhood school, the chaiwala, idliwala, presswala—everything—is here? Your roots are here. How can that not be home?”
I laughed and said, “Tum nahi samjhoge.” But the question stayed longer than I expected. No one had asked me that upfront before. Maybe they wondered. Maybe people assumed that when I called Chicago home, I was being sentimental about two “adventurous years abroad.” But over time, I’ve realised it wasn’t the city itself. It was that Chicago taught me what home could be. What a life designed by me, for me, actually felt like. And for someone who grew up in a fairly conservative 90s household—where every move was tracked and accounted for—that meant everything.
I couldn’t just walk out of the house for a walk. There had to be a reason. A justification. A report. The hangover of a social tradition that puts women behind invisible walls, gives them designated spaces, and questions any deviation. For instance, my entire 20s wardrobe was defined by “will dad allow me to wear this?”
We, the 90s kids, were the generation with maximum cultural dissonance. We were the first to be exposed to American TV, English novels, the idea of a teenage bedroom with posters, and lives where girls had agency. Yet we were also steeped in Indian expectations. The gap between what life was and what life could be split us right down the middle.
I was always “too English” for some peers and “not English enough” for others. Too theoretical for non-readers, not committed enough for the serious readers. Never nerd enough. Never jock enough. An in-between person floating between worlds without belonging fully to any. My interests were wildly different from everyone in my immediate circles. No one cared about stories the way I did; those who did drifted out of my life quickly, pulled by other cities, other opportunities. I read both cultural theory and the latest in reality TV, understood enough tech to guide a project, but also believed in tarot and astrology for the fun of it. Holding opposite ideas, driven by the north star of truth and curiosity.
So the idea that home could be a place where my thoughts didn’t need explanation, where I didn’t have to shrink or modulate myself to fit predetermined moulds—it felt alien. Life had always been presented through templates inherited from our parents and their parents before them. A girl’s life ending at graduation; her education a mere ornament to find a “better” husband; her clothes scrutinised for what they “signalled.” These weren’t just expectations—they were conditions of existence. They shaped the air we breathed.
Chicago interrupted that script. It was the first place that felt culturally aligned with the version of myself I had grown up imagining. Not because it was America, or because it was glamorous, but because it loosened the knots I didn’t know were tied around me. It allowed me to break cycles of scarcity, fear, and inherited behaviour that I didn’t have the language for until then.
And here’s the funny thing: I don’t think the USA was home. But it taught me what home meant. Those two years showed me what it felt like to breathe without explaining, to choose without negotiating, to exist without bending first. They taught me the feeling of home—the internal spaciousness of being fully myself.
And I’ve spent the last five years trying to recreate that feeling in the only geography where “home” actually exists: in the largest density of people I love, and the fastest access to the rest. That means drawing the boundaries on Consent begins at the dinner table, or how I define a party. It means being honest regardless of how tough the situation gets, it means asking for the things I want without feeling like I cannot deserve it.
Everything that defines home—people, connection, memory—is India. But Chicago opened a door to a version of home that wasn’t inherited but built. A home that wasn’t defined by geography but by how I felt in my own skin.
Ever since coming back, that’s what I’ve tried to transplant: the interior freedom I found there, stitched into the fabric of the life I have here. It’s not easy. Not for me, and not for friends and family who suddenly met a version of me they didn’t know existed.
But home, I’ve realised, is not always what you want it to be at first. Sometimes it’s something you craft steadily, stubbornly, quietly. A slow rebuilding. A slow becoming. A slow claiming of your own skin.
And only then does the place around you start to feel like home too.