In November last year I finally started reading Moth Smoke, a book I had for lack of any apparent reason never read before. Set in Lahore, the book instantly struck a chord.

Time and place overnight transformed it into a raw wound for two reasons. First, the description of Lahore’s Canal Road and The Mall and various other landmarks were from a time before the mega structure that runs through the city today existed, one that obscures not only the view of Ichhra and Shama cinema but also the imagination of monsoon skies, if the said places were one’s only vantage point.

Second, I read it while not in Lahore, and halfway through the book the Omicron variant-propelled travel restrictions made the journey home, planned well in advance, seem uncertain. So it is now, months after the episode and accompanying emotions that I revisit the idea the Mohsin Hamid novel so forcefully brought to the fore of my otherwise quite complacent thoughts — what and where is home?

I read a borrowed copy which has since been returned to the library; hence I fail to quote the part I read more than once. It had to do with air conditioning. The other was when Daru sits in his home after losing electricity and gaining invincibility. In hindsight, his home was a place of comfort and pain, a site of love and infidelity. If home was just a dwelling, his would be thus. One’s city can also be one’s home, and Daru’s was corrupt and opulent, unforgivably hot and painfully inescapable.

Depending on where and when one reads it, perhaps the book would evoke ‘home’ and whatever accompanies the thought. For home can be an idea, a symbol, a feeling, a politicised tool, an economic marker, an organising principle of society, a material object either possessed or sought, a space and place escaped to or from. Reading Moth Smoke in November, Lahore was home and the destination appeared to fade behind the unexpected.

Shelly Mallett asks if home is “a place, a space, a feeling, practices or an active state of being in the world.” She then goes on to explore a variety of theoretical conceptualisations of home. These span across disciplines while some tend to be interdisciplinary. Nevertheless, the common strand in all these appears to be dynamism.

Whatever home is, a place or a feeling or something that eludes description, it changes. If a material object will not crumble on its own, the ideal form will inspire the owner to adapt. And one journeys through many homes and remains in search of new ones; some sojourns longer than the others, some transformative others validating. One can also give up on home and apathy creeps in — much like it did for Daru. If away, in time or place, one may long for a home known to one as a nurturing place. Holding on to fragments that bring to life, even if briefly, that which was left behind; continuing to search for it in artifacts; performing the embodiment of home in nostalgia.

But what of home as homeland? If one does return after a period of separation, voluntary or forced, how does one see it. I remember reading a post on Twitter sometime in December, where a person returning to Karachi had commented on the state of urban expansion while being conscious to not draw comparisons between Karachi and whichever alternative place had occupied their vision. I found the conscious effort quite interesting, for truly one has to stop the impulse of comparing all those other worlds with one’s own home. Indeed, journeys may have been made to escape certain aspects of a birthplace but seeking validation for those journeys by carving refuge in purely reductionist narratives is quite an appalling conversation.

In a similar vein follows the thought of exoticising parts of the city which may not hold personal sentimental value, but perhaps occupy a position of aesthetic appeal. Posting photographs online of which may ingratiate oneself with those one sees as ‘cultured’ — people who possess the ability to appreciate history, lament at loss and position themselves as the cosmopolitan torchbearers of modernity. Hence, how one sees it and how one wishes it to be seen become intertwined. Inherent in which is the idea of whose gaze matters, an idea woven into the complex idea of home. Especially, if one is to engage with the public and private dimension of home and outside. The dilemma of scrutiny and surveillance, the desire to position oneself for a certain view and the self-consciousness of the act find their way home.

Much like it was for Mohsin Hamid’s Daru, home is a background against which the narrative of one’s life unfolds. Whether it is a residential place or a city, a space occupied consistently or intermittently. The opening lines of Asad Amanat Ali’s rendition of Ghar wapis jab aao gay tum are evocative and poignant. While Daru’s home transforms into a dark, lifeless space around him, Altaf Gauhar’s poetry can be interpreted to revolve around the alienation experienced upon returning home after, presumably, a long journey which transforms the place as much as the person returning to an imaginary home. Poetry lends itself to interpretation reflective of the one finding and projecting meaning. The imagined and the lived home are relational as much as the internal and the external transformation are.

The winter makes for grim readings and melancholic tunes. And so it was that the idea of a barrier stopping from journeying home, while losing imagination in the yellowing pages of a book set in Lahore, kindled the wish to search for the meaning of home. As transitive as the experience of being and searching for one is, the complexity ridden concept remains ever elusive and its valuation subjective. Perhaps it is what one finds it to be, the loss of one making what was once present known. A space in constant flux, on some days a place to escape from, on others one to long for. The meaning and study of home is, as Hollander puts it, “it all depends.”

The writer studied psychology and education. She can be reached at irumaqbool@gmail.com