Home is the inheritance of stories

We were on the road as the sun rose in the sky and the last of the dew drops disappeared; the NH7 in front of us – expansive, solid, aged, full of stories of so many generations, when a song popped on my playlist – “jugni rukh pipal da hoyi, jisnoo pujeta har koi, jisdi phasal kise na boi, ghar vi rakh sake na koi”. (Jugni is like the Pipal tree, you can cherish her, but you can’t keep her at home).

Ghar was always something left behind. Ghar was a sonnet in Punjabi that would serenade me into a land tinged with nostalgia – memories that weren’t quite mine, yet would never leave me.

A few days ago, I read an article that spoke about “the trickle-down impact of the partition on the third generation.” The third generation… people like me whose grandparents had witnessed the partition and all its hurt and heartbreak. That sentence articulated something for me that I hadn’t quite been able to put a finger on – the feeling that we continue to live in our ancestor’s stories.

Last year, I started a little passion project in the making for over a decade. Kahaani Kollective is an exploration of the stories we inherit. In Punjabi, there is a word for the inheritance of things beyond the material – Virsa, like the Hindi viraasat. The things we inherit simply by being born in a certain family, a town, a region, a culture, a period. These stories are redefining for me what it means to belong.

On the road from Chandigarh to Patiala, we came across an ancestral home inside a 300-year-old fort. It belonged to a long-lost friend of my maternal uncle who dug out his old contacts when I told him that I wanted to travel to Punjab to reconnect with my roots. The Guron family’s home is everything I remember homes used to be. An aangan blooming in bougainvillea. Dainty China with intricate floral inlays to serve tea. A sandook that hasn’t been opened in years. A terrace with endless views of the fields below. Jaali windows and that “exposed brick” aesthetic.

On another road, as we were crossing Gurdaspur, my mother called. She casually told me that Gurdaspur is where she spent many summer holidays while her dad stayed there to build the Army Cantonment. Oh, and Dalhousie where you are headed is where we would go to escape the heat of the plains. Without realizing it, she had put me smack in the middle of a family story, a journey that had transcended time and generations to bring me here. I saw Gurdaspur in a whole new light. We took a detour to go see the Cantt that my Nana-ji had built. This had been his home for a while.

My paternal granddad’s house was the first home I knew. It was a simple home with strict rules. No Coke allowed during meals. My mother would still sneak us some in steel glasses so papaji wouldn’t find out. I miss those steel glasses with those tiny engravings that ensured they always came back home to the rightful owner. The verandah had a rotary dial phone with a sharp ring that felt like it echoed across the mohalla. As a kid, I loved the feeling of dialling a number on that phone - winding the wheel and hearing it purring back in place, five, sometimes six times. The heavy handset carrying promises of laughter with cousins in distant lands.

So many sounds bring us home. I sit on balconies with my friends today, discussing the latest stories that are moving us. And always in the background, there is a song. A Punjabi folk, a ghazal, a Bollywood ballad, a road trip playlist. They ask me to translate Punjabi for them and I use my chaldi-phirdi knowledge to elaborate on lyrics that are then discussed, expounded, treasured, and felt in a deep way that bonds us even further. Those balconies are home too.

Why these memories? Why the Punjab I have never lived in? Why the language I hardly speak on a daily basis? Why the aangan and the fields that were never part of my own childhood? There is an irresistible pull to a land and a culture that I have only known in parts. Many Punjabis live this way. An unspoken, unseen diaspora, far from the mitti that used to be home. The more I dig, the more it seems to me that these are memories of my ancestors that live within me.

I guess my exploration of the inheritance of stories is a seeking of all the Punjabiyat we left behind, and an honouring of all the Punjabiyat that’s always echoed in my family home. My Dad’s theth Punjabi that involuntarily slips from his tongue every time he wants to express an emotion. My massi’s book of Punjabi wedding sangeet that she hand wrote and promptly sent photocopies to the entire family. How the word family didn’t really exist in our vocabulary, for the longest time it was “tabbar” – a word that honours the large, raucous madness of being a Punjabi. My brother’s almost awe-inspiring way of having a jugaad for everything. My mother’s insistence that an auspicious day must start and end with kheer.  

And me? People have always told me “You don’t seem Punjabi enough. Are you sure you are from this family? I have to remind them that I am my mother’s daughter – gentle, groomed, always the proper lady amidst society. But that in private company, I am also my father’s son – loud, bindaas, ever the storyteller, and the nostalgia monger.

Earlier this year, our “NRI family” made a surprise visit. That day, home was all uproarious laughter, sweet childhood memories, my bua’s choori (exactly how beeji, my grandmum, used to make it), and Bollywood songs we grew up on. We argued loudly and passionately about everything, from the Modi government to the ingrained patriarchy that still exists in Punjabi households to family spats with no end in sight. The general consensus was that arguing was in our blood, and we wouldn’t have it any other way. Yeh humein viraasat mein mila hai.

Someday when I build a home of my own, I envision it filled with the laughter of a loud, ever-excitable, ever-argumentative tabbar. Auspicious days will begin with kheer. Kahaanis will be shared over long, languorous meals. An aangan will echo with the nostalgic score of our life’s background track – that rimjhim song that Dad used to sing. The walls will honour the trickle-down impact of ancestral memories as we make new ones. Home is the inheritance of stories.

All my gratitude to Ochre Sky Stories, Natasha Badhwar and Raju Tai for helping me articulate this deep longing, this long-awaited dream, this feeling of home that I seek and now nurture :) every single day.

Building a space for the stories we inherit at Kahaani Kollective 🦚