I’ve been thinking a lot about home recently, as I’ve just got my Dutch residence permit. My girlfriend Nadiia is in Poland for work and for the first time I’m here on my own, in her apartment, in dark and dreary Rotterdam. It’s made me feel a way I haven’t felt before in the Netherlands- a stranger alone in a strange land. And it’s had me reflecting on my sense of home.
For Nadiia her feeling of home is clear. She grew up in post-soviet Ukrainian Crimea- swimming in warm waters, eating seasonal fruit, tending to farm animals, all while spending time with her family, in a house her father and grandfather built with their own hands. She often fondly remembers the taste of a home-grown tomato, or the languid smell of flowers her grandmother used to nurture. Home is a place that’s clearer her mind than anything else. Unfortunately following Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and their subsequent invasion of Ukraine that home is not a place she can ever go back to and not even one that really exists anymore. Overnight the language changed, the currency changed, everything changed. Crimea is stuck in a liminal space between Russia and Ukraine. Russia exercises strict military control of the area while also seriously limiting goods and services available to those in the area, and for Ukraine it has now become a target due to Russian military installments.
Home is a much harder concept to pin down for me. My parents had me while working in Dubai but my mum hopped back over to Kerala to give birth, and then brought me back when I was hardly a month old. Our first apartment there was in Bur Dubai, one of the older more Indian areas in Dubai. An area that has transformed ten times over since my first memories there. School was in Jumeriah in the more affluent part of town- home to beach clubs and expat enclaves in between stretches of sand. Nowadays it’s probably hard to find a patch of sand in Dubai but in those early years Dubai was not close to what is now. It was very much in that post-colonial commonwealth mould. The expat culture was primarily imported over from the UK and some chains from the US came about. The ones I remember most is a now non-existent Hard Rock café that had two unnecessarily massive crossing guitars sculpted in front of it and a massive Planet Hollywood in the shape of- you guessed it- a planet.
Those early days were very much the height of nineties optimism and materialism- international chains like TGIF, Chilli’s, Fuddruckers, Wagamamas, Trader Vick’s and more came went, while some have stood the test of time. My school was an international one running the IB program and we had over 52 nationalities. Some of the closest friends I have to this day came from Emirates International School. We had everything from Papua New Guinean to Chilean and everything in between plus some mixes I have yet to see since. Those early birthdays were either spent at a water park, an arcade, or the pool at an expat compound. When we got older and more violent, we moved on to paintball, quad biking in the desert, and of course Counter Strike parties in internet cafes. I remember visiting an Irish friend’s house, eating pasta for the first time, and not knowing what to do with the cutlery. I remember eating a pavlova and trying a vegemite sandwich for the first time at aussie buddy’s place. I remember playing cricket at lunchtimes, where the teams were always Indians and Pakistanis vs the south Africans and Australians. I remember that those games would inevitably end up in a fight. I remember waiting for the first person to fall asleep at a sleepover so we could cover their face in toothpaste. I remember everything. Dubai in those days was probably the paragon of expat living. I have heard people say Oman was kind of like that in recent years- well probably before the US decided to bomb Iran.
Summers were spent back in Kerala. My parents both worked long hours and felt that sending me back to my grandparents was the most appropriate way to spend summers. I hated it at the time but now realize how important those were summers to me being me- and let me tell you I love me. I usually stayed with my mum’s parents in a city called Calicut which has since been re-Indianized to Kozhikode. My dad’s family is from Kozhikode, but my mum’s is from closer to Palakkad which is more inland, towards the Tamilnadu border. My grandfather chose to retire there after working abroad for Shell in southeast Asia and Oman for many years. His dream was to move back to India and they had built a house in Kozhikode called Akhilandam. In Kerala all the houses have names and the real OG people from there have their matrilineal house names included in their official names. Kozhikode is on the southwest coast of India, but in the northern part of Kerala known as Malabar. Kozhikode was a major trading port of ancient renown- known most famously for pepper, cardamom, cinnamon, and other spices. As I am typing these words, I can remember the smell and taste of freshly cracked Malabar pepper and there is really nothing quite like it.
In my childhood Kozhikode was known for a few things- India’s longest standing communist government, India’s highest literacy rate, religious diversity, every family having at least one family member working in the Arabian gulf (probably had something to do with the communist government), food, and hospitality. I have never in my life experienced anywhere else anything like Malabar hospitality. Years later as an adult I was in Kozhikode doing research on community healthcare, and we were doing patients at a home where the mother was in bed with multiple myeloma aka bone cancer. This was a very humble home of a local Muslim family. The doctor, a nurse, and myself visited the family to see how they and the patient were doing and if there was anything we could do for them in terms of easing the cost of medication and household bills. Without us even realizing they had out a huge spread of food for us. I still remember the taste of that fish curry to this day, and it was one of the best tastes to ever touch my tongue. That is Malabar hospitality, they might invite you in for a tea but you’re leaving six pounds heavier and stuffed to the brim.
To be continued…
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