What is home?
It is a question that has been with me for as long as I can remember, a quiet echo that grows louder each time I try to answer it. As a child who moved between cities, I learnt early that walls change, windows open to new skies, and streets never quite belong to you for long. I have wondered if home is ever really a place, or if it is the people who give a place its pulse, who turn its air familiar, who make you feel safe. I still do not know.
I have carried this question into countless conversations, not to satisfy curiosity alone, but to see how others name it for themselves. Their answers are often like little maps—some drawn in sharp lines, others blurred with memory.
One evening, at a gathering swollen with noise, I found myself seeking quiet. The music, the chatter, the silver chime of glasses—it all receded as I stepped into a corner where the air felt still. A petite woman was already there, her posture composed, as though she too had decided to let the noise pass her by.
We began to speak, and, as I so often do, I found myself asking her the question that has followed me for years.
"We stay in Rajouri Garden," she said with a warm, easy smile. I nodded, knowing the next question would come. "So are you originally from there as well?"
Her smile faltered, just for the smallest moment. Almost nothing, but I caught it. "We are originally from Swat in Pakistan," she said, her voice steady, though something else rested just beneath it.
Like so many Punjabi families who had come to Delhi after Partition, I assumed her story was one of displacement inherited from an earlier generation. But Padma Makhija, forty-five, had moved to India only in 2004, when she married. Her parents and siblings still live in the Swat Valley, one of the last threads in the small Hindu community that remains there.
"I had visited India before, because many of our relatives live here," she told me. "But now I am an Indian citizen, while my family is still in the valley."
Her words stirred something I had not expected. My surprise was not born of the well-worn tensions between our two countries, but from meeting someone who was young enough to remember the land my own grandparents had left behind. She was not a sepia photograph in an album, nor a story softened by retelling. She was a living bridge to that place as it exists now—the scent of its earth after rain, the sharpness of its winter air, the rhythm of its seasons.
"Every time I visit the mountains with my family, my thoughts drift to the Swat Valley and its breathtaking beauty," she said softly. "It takes me back to the home where I grew up, to the landscapes etched in my memory. There is a beauty that binds both places, a beauty that feels whole and eternal, and yet they are worlds apart, held back from each other by borders and the politics between them."
Her husband, Anil, came to Delhi much earlier. He was eighteen when his family left Mardan in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in the early 1980s. Today, the two of them run a business in the labyrinth of Sadar Bazaar, but the flavours of home travel with them. Many of the dishes they cook are shared across the border, but some are rooted so deeply in that region that making them is almost an act of remembering.
Anil described his kadhai mutton—just meat, tomatoes, ghee, green chillies, and salt—slow-cooked for hours until the flavours sink into one another. "Kadhai is so common there," he said, smiling at the thought. "I remember how we would all sit together and polish it off. That memory we keep alive here too."
While Anil’s family is now entirely in India, Padma’s heart moves between here and the valley she left. "I fondly remember the mote chawal ki khichdi with desi ghee that my mother would make for us. That is the smell of home for me. Whenever someone visits from there, I always ask for mote chawal and makke ka aata. It is what I grew up on."
"People are not bad anywhere," she said quietly. "It is situations, shaped by politics, that push them away from each other."
Her home is here now. Yet it is also there, where her family still lives, in the folds of mountains I have only known through stories. And perhaps that is the truth about home—it can live in more than one place, and sometimes, painfully, in the spaces between them.