Place is not always an address or an area one occupies physically; it is the freedom to go anywhere one wants. It includes the sky with its birds and the grass with its dew. To roam at will, to stop only to sleep.
A child finds heaven in its mother’s lap; a person in love may, in a romantic fit, wish to occupy only the space between a lover’s arms. We take empty sites and fill them with us, lending them our living, breathing presence.
Minimalism and simplicity, sparse living with kitchen gardens and organic produce are all a part of the human need to survive on as little as possible, as natural as possible. One never knows when he will be chased out for praying to the wrong god. If reduced to homelessness, due to political conspiracy or the horrors of migration, or even if one’s shadow falls in another’s yard.
Land-owning ancestors went on acquiring sprees simply to expand their acreage. Owning a property—purchasing and signing deeds, the act of moving in, tinkering with it, growing crops in it, dreaming in their own backyard—was a lifelong affair.
One died where one lived. Home is the roof over their head, the ground under their feet. Their own little corner, terra firma that belonged to them and them alone. No one could eject them out of it. But what they see out the window, sense beyond their door, those winding stretches—they remain out of reach. They belong always to someone else.
A willing exit from familiar location expresses the desire to straddle the outside, to walk alternate routes and maps. The jobless who travel out, the student seeking courses abroad, the bride who flies out to join her husband—they are all looking to better their lot. Rarely does one give up his bricks and mortar to sleep on a foreign pavement. How frightening, how cold, alien soil!
Outside a man’s personal and professional cubicles he is lost. Should he turn left, should he turn right? The idea of personal space, more ideological than literal, is as immeasurable as it is abstract. Passports have to be shown, racism rears its head, genocides await the wanderer who dares to set camp in enemy territory.
The urge to mark territory goes back to that time in man’s history when land had to be grabbed. Ousting neighbours to set up home in their homes came easily then. It is perhaps in our DNA, the desire to take over another’s space, to plant our feet where someone else stands. Hounded out for caste or colour, out of our four walls, out of comfort zones, we arrive at another destination, and begin the process of belonging all over again.
If real estate was only a matter of cement and fences, of acres and roots, why did someone even bother to prove the earth was round? One day the globe will belong to all of us equally; no barricades, no walls, no one asking for papers or proof. Until then let’s continue to tear up the planet to pieces.
(Shinie Antony can be contacted at shinieantony@gmail.com)