Home

Home is where your heart goes back time and again, where you want to spend your quality time enjoying the activities that you like. Home is the elated feeling that you experience when you reach the city that you grew up after being away from it. You love glimpses of your city in films or snaps an even recognize locations just by looking closely at the public spaces.

Home is the city that you travel through every day and still feel that there is more to explore, places you have never been to and places which you know like the palm of your hand. It’s always with a sense of curiosity and streak of curiosity that you love to explore its nooks and corners along with your soul friend and you just love the comfort of your favourite hangouts such as the museum campus or the beaches or the coffeehouses.

Home is your sacred space, the altar that you have created for everything that you hold close to your heart. Home is a place where I am comfortable, candid and naughty, real and authentic. Home is not four walls but the familiar comfortable space that you curl up with a well-thumbed book and a cup of coffee.

Home is you. You are my home, the safe space that you return to every time for solace far from the strife of this world. You are my home, a place of comfort that I want to wake up in and go to sleep in and cherish every time your thought crosses my mind. Home is your memory that I carry safe in my heart, safe and sacred like a talisman throughout the years and where I wander every time this world becomes too much to bear.

goat days

Goat Days

Goat Days, written by the Gulf Malayali Benyamin and translated by Joseph Koyillapally, is worth reading and worth remembering as well. Like Yann Martel's Booker-winning Life of Pi, Goat Days captures the ordeals of an innocent man in a hell beyond his imagination and creates an animal allegory to drive home his message. 

Najeeb has the typical Malayali dream, of being in the Gulf and sending money home. His desires resemble the luxuries of a Gulf-returned Malayali: “ a gold watch, fridge, TV, car, AC, tape recorder, VCP, a heavy gold chain”. He lands in Riyadh on a visa sent by his friend's brother-in-law but the life that awaits him there does not resemble his earlier idea of a gulf life. 

He finds himself in a masara tending goats, camels and sheep; working day and night; feeding them and milking them; in fact, living like one of them. He forgets even the simple pleasures of his former life such as wasing himself or even the right to privacy while defecating. However, he finds the company of the animals more comforting than that of the cruel and inhuman arbab. He longs for his homeland, the bath in the river, the presence of his family and for rain.When Najeeb breaks out of his masara and runs away, it is a huge step towards the unknown. Like Pi, Najeeb thanks God for being with him during his ordeal. 

Readable and memorable, Goat Days represents the ordeals of many Indian immigrants across the Gulf countries, the reality of which is glossed over by the glittering opulence of the few lucky ones. It is surely a slice of real life. May be a goat's life. 

I am waiting eagerly to watch the film adaptation and to reread the book to see the similarities and differences.