The heart is not always its GSP marker
The news refuses to go away even when you think you’ve got away. The first visual at London’s Museum of the Home’ was of ‘Bunoo’, an ayah brought to England from Calcutta in 1878 ‘to look after the Stevenson family’s children during the long voyage’, and then sent packing. ‘Deported’ was nowhere in the text, but throughout my afternoon there, similar headlines from back home kept echoing inside my head.
Built in 1924 over a cluster of 14 early 18th-century alms houses, the museum began capturing how each immigrant wave crashing on Brit shores turned four alien walls into a familiar home. It was expansively and expensively redeveloped in 2021 to engage with issues of ‘belonging, inequality, and ecological sustainability’. The mission was to ‘reveal and rethink the ways we live, in order to live better together’. High minded. But today’s looming reality is ‘Home Soured Home’. Everywhere.
In my native West Bengal, the 3D of ‘Detect Delete Deport’ has overtaken the 2D of ‘Didi’. Newly swept-in CM crowed that 5,000 ‘illegal Bangladeshis’ had been swept out within days of the BJP coup. Just months earlier, SIR had made 2.7mn long-time locals electorally homeless. Even in my adoptive city – far, far from that pesky border – the just-elected saffron mayor pronounced that Mumbai’s most pressing problem was not crumbling civic services, but, ‘illegal Bangladeshis’.
That was Feb. Last week, even as I walked through London’s Museum of the Home, back in Mumbai, the physical contours of home were being obliterated by flood and landslide. Whole buildings, not just ramshackle shanties, gone in a scream, courtesy mindless road-concretising, preening infrastructure, and greedy ‘development’. In Mumbai (or Wayanad), home was where the heartless builder-politician is.
Chew on this: ‘Home’/ ‘hole’, the interchange of one little letter encompasses a huge, multi-layered loss.
As for smug you and me who fear neither monsoon flood nor season-neutral bulldozer, or even ‘Keep Out’ rules of co-op housing societies, we can no longer flash our arrogant passports. Now that’s no guarantee of ‘home’ either.
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Alec Smart said: “Needed soon, a (human) Agony Aunt for AI relationships. ”
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
