Between the Lines: Home and Its Various Forms

Published every Friday, Between the Lines is a weekly column by Namrata. This week, she writes about home and the ways it holds, shelters, excludes, and persists.

There are houses you can walk through in the dark without turning on a single light, your body remembering the exact distance between doorways, the slight unevenness of a threshold, the place where the wall narrows just enough that you instinctively turn sideways and then there are others where even in full daylight, nothing quite settles, where every object feels temporarily placed, as though it might be packed away again at short notice, where even the act of sitting down carries a faint awareness that you might have to leave.

The difference is not always ownership, or time, or even memory, but something more elusive in which a space either receives you fully or keeps you, gently but unmistakably, at its edge. Once you begin to notice that difference, the idea of home begins to shift, losing its certainty, loosening from the assumption that it is a place one simply has.

Because in so many South Asian narratives, home is not given in any uncomplicated way. It is inherited without always being chosen, sustained without always being acknowledged, remembered long after it has ceased to exist, and inhabited with an awareness that it does not belong equally to everyone within it.

A house may stand unchanged for decades, its walls holding steady against time, and yet the lives within it rearrange themselves constantly, through small, nearly invisible adjustments, until what appears stable from the outside begins to reveal itself as something far more precarious, held together not by certainty but by habit.

chair in front of a house — Photo by Aman Uttam on Pexels.com

What is a Home?

Home is often spoken of as though it were singular and self-evident, but in practice, it gathers different meanings depending on who is naming it and from where. For some, it is a place of return, where the body loosens without thinking, where familiarity settles into muscle memory; for others, it is something provisional, assembled out of rented rooms, shifting cities, or relationships that offer temporary anchorage without permanence. There are those for whom home is deeply tied to inheritance of land, language, or lineage, and others for whom it exists more fully in memory than in geography, carried forward in fragments rather than contained within walls. In many South Asian narratives, these meanings do not remain separate. They overlap and contradict, so that a single space can offer comfort and unease in equal measure, can hold intimacy while enforcing distance, can feel like belonging to one person and exclusion to another.

This multiplicity becomes even more apparent when one begins to consider how unevenly home is experienced. For some, it is stability, while for others, it is expectation. It can be a site of care, but also of labour that disappears into routine, sustained quietly and often without acknowledgment. It can be a place one is expected to leave, as in many stories of women who move from one household to another or a place one is never allowed to fully inhabit, shaped instead by identity, by caste, by gender, by the limits placed on the body and the self.

Memory, Women, and Labour

In Clear Light of Day, Anita Desai returns to a home that has outlasted almost everything else, its rooms thick with memory, not as something past but as something still present, lingering in corners, settling into objects, shaping the ways in which those who remain move through the space. The house does not offer resolution; it holds on to what has been left unfinished, so that living within it becomes less about inhabiting a place and more about coexisting with what refuses to leave. Elsewhere, the act of leaving does not free one from home as much as it complicates it.

In The Lowland, Jhumpa Lahiri traces how distance fractures the idea of home into something layered and uneven, where what is left behind continues to shape what is built elsewhere, and where belonging becomes something that must be negotiated across time, across geography, across generations that inherit memories they did not live through but cannot entirely escape. What emerges is not nostalgia in any simple sense, but a more persistent dislocation with the sense that home, once left, does not remain intact, and that what replaces it is never quite whole. For women, especially, home is rarely something that can be inhabited without negotiation.

It is where labour settles most invisibly, where the smooth functioning of a household depends on work that is so continuous it begins to disappear into the background with the cooking, the cleaning, the remembering, and the anticipating, until the space itself appears effortless, as though it sustains itself. And yet beneath that effortlessness lies a structure that must be maintained, often by those who are least acknowledged within it.

Movements and Belonging

A woman may leave one home only to find herself recreating its rhythms elsewhere, carrying its expectations with her, so that even in movement there is continuity, even in departure there is repetition.

In the work of Tishani Doshi, this movement is rarely framed as uncomplicated release. It carries the residue of what has been left unresolved, so that new spaces are layered with the old, and the idea of home becomes something that cannot be easily replaced, only reconfigured.

For many, however, the idea of home does not arrive intact, but altered by the conditions under which it must be lived. For women, especially, home can become something that is both intimate and estranging at once. Home becomes a space they sustain, organise, and are expected to belong to, and yet one that is not entirely theirs to define, so that belonging is often conditional, negotiated through roles rather than granted as presence. The search for home, then, does not always end at the threshold of a house; it extends across years, across relationships, across the quiet hope of inhabiting a space without having to adjust oneself to fit it.

A similar instability shapes the lives of those for whom home cannot offer the safety it promises. Dalit and Adivasi communities, for instance, whose relationship to place is often marked by friction, displacement, and the constant awareness that what should anchor them may also expose them. In such lives, movement is not always chosen but compelled, and in that repeated act of leaving and re-entering spaces, the idea of home begins to shift, becoming less a place of assured belonging and more an ongoing negotiation between safety, dignity, and the fragile possibility of staying.

Untouched, Unspoken, and Unheard

There are also homes that cannot remain untouched by what happens beyond them, no matter how firmly they attempt to hold their boundaries.

In The Collaborator by Mirza Waheed, the landscape refuses separation, so that violence enters the idea of home not as intrusion but as a condition, altering what it means to feel sheltered at all. The walls remain, but their meaning shifts; safety becomes uncertain, belonging contingent, and the home itself begins to absorb what it cannot keep out.

And then there are lives in which home does not quite arrive, not because it is lost, but because it never fully forms.

In Homeless: Growing Up Lesbian and Dyslexic in India, K Vaishali writes from within a space where neither family nor the world beyond it offers complete recognition, where identity itself unsettles the possibility of belonging, and where the search for home becomes less about place and more about the fragile hope of being seen without distortion. Here, home is not something one returns to, but something that remains perpetually deferred, glimpsed but not secured.

A similar unsettling of belonging runs through The Grammar of My Body by Abhishek Anicca, where disability reshapes the contours of home in ways that are deeply embodied, so that the question is not only where one belongs, but how one belongs within relationships, within language, within one’s own body. Comfort and estrangement overlap to make home something that must be negotiated continuously, never fully arrived at.

These narratives widen the frame, asking what happens when the structures meant to hold you fail to account for who you are, and what it means to continue seeking belonging in their absence. And yet, even when home cannot be inhabited without difficulty, it persists in memory, in gesture, in the smallest of details that surface unexpectedly.

In Meatless Days, Sara Suleri reconstructs home not as a fixed place but as something that flickers in and out of presence, held together through fragments, like the taste of a meal, the cadence of a voice, or the rhythm of a day once lived. What remains is not coherence, but continuity of a different kind, one that refuses to settle into a single narrative.

Similarly, in Reef by Romesh Gunesekera, home is remembered from a distance that alters it, so that what is recalled is shaped as much by absence as by presence, and yet continues to tug your heart.

Across these works, home begins to take on a different texture that is neither singular nor stable, but layered, contradictory, and often unresolved, capable of offering comfort while enforcing control, of holding memory while resisting change, of providing belonging to some while quietly excluding others, often within the same walls, often without being named.

It is also something that is performed. In the careful arrangement of space when guests arrive, in the preservation of appearances that suggest order even when there is strain beneath, or in the discipline through which a household sustains itself, home becomes something that must be enacted repeatedly, so that what appears natural is, in fact, continuously made. And perhaps this is where its hold lies.

Not in certainty, but in persistence. Not in stability, but in the way it continues to shape how people move, remember, and relate to one another, even when it has been left behind, even when it has been lost, even when it has never quite been theirs.

Because if a home can exist as memory more than place, if it can be carried without being possessed, if it can shelter and unsettle in the same breath, if it can belong fully to some and only partially to others, and if it can remain present even in its absence, then when we speak of home, are we naming a place we return to, or a condition we keep trying, in different ways, to survive?

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