The call of home
BY: K S S Pillai
A home is a social unit formed by a family living together and helping one another. It is supposed to be secure, peaceful, and unified. Scriptures ask us to welcome strangers, refugees, the homeless, and the hungry to our homes. A home should also be a place of worship and education.
They also ask us to build our homes upon a solid structural and moral foundation to ensure their long-term sustainability. If done so, they do not fall when the rain comes down, the streams rise, and the winds blow and beat against them. All have so much attachment to their homes that those stranded in lonely islands or thick jungles pray to God to lead them to their homes.
Even the animals living with their human masters love the place where they live as their home. When several kittens or puppies are born, it is common practice to leave the excess animals miles away at night, sometimes bundling them into sacks to confuse them about the direction, but they always return home to the amazement of all.
Birds spend the whole day searching for food far away from their nests but head back to those nests in the evenings. Sea turtles lay eggs on the shore, but their young hurry back to the sea as soon as they are hatched.
The other day, when I tried to follow a black ant hurrying in a particular direction late at night, I was told it was going home somewhere in the crevices where it would be impossible to follow.
At the end of office time, the employees rush to their homes to be with their loved ones and to take rest. Small children, even the financially poor ones, rush towards their homes during the lunch hour and at the end of the school day to be with other members of their families.
Recently, the media were full of reports of a large number of people getting gravely injured at a Mumbai railway station when they assembled there to board a train headed north without reserving their berths. They were going towards their homes in Bihar, eastern Uttar Pradesh and nearby areas to celebrate Chhath Puja and Diwali.
The problem was not much different when COVID-19 broke out some years ago, and people died like proverbial flies. Several hospitals had no oxygen or ventilators. Neither were there any effective remedies.
When many employers shut down their workplaces, the first place that came to the workers’ minds was their homes in distant places. Since several trains and buses were cancelled, many started walking to their faraway homes, the males carrying their meagre possessions on their heads while the women had the little children’s responsibility. Those luckier pushed their old bicycles after keeping these things on them. Many lost their lives when a train ran over them when they slept on a railway track.
As ours is a large country with no uniformity in wages paid to workers in different parts, there is always movement of the workforce from one place to another. While they get high wages in some states, lower amounts are paid in other parts.
As most workers in states like Kerala have left for other countries to earn more, their places are filled by those from different parts of the country, as the wages in Kerala are much higher. They all go home at intervals, spending their hard-earned money on travelling, sometimes even flying to save time.
People have been moving to the greener pastures of the country and outside for years, but they all come back periodically to their homes. The first time I saw a man in trousers, apart from film heroes, was one of my uncles who came home on leave from Malaya, where he had settled. Many went to Burma, Assam and nearby areas to work in tea and rubber estates and even married local girls, but they used to come home regularly on leave.
(The author is a retired professor of English. A regular contributor to ‘The Kashmir Vision’, his articles and short stories have been published by several national and international publications)
