The Geography of Missing: How Home Became Plural

Or: How I Learned That Homesickness Isn't Actually About Geography

Missing home isn't a dedicated hour or day of home sickness. It hits me in Southall when I smell garam masala, or when someone plays an old Hindi song, or when news from India feels like it's happening to someone else's family. At the same time, I'm also building new home rituals - Sunday papers, afternoon tea, conversations about British politics, which I’ve slowly begun to understand.

Home is becoming complicated, layered, beautifully contradictory. I'm learning you can love more than one place at once, even when they're completely different worlds.

The Myth of Linear Homesickness

Everyone expects homesickness to be simple. A clean narrative of missing what you left behind, gradually replaced by appreciation for where you are now. Like emotional decluttering: out with the old feelings, in with the new geographical allegiances.

Bollocks.

What actually happens is more like emotional hoarding. You miss Mumbai's 2 AM vada pav vendors while simultaneously developing an unhealthy attachment to Richmond Park on Sunday mornings. You get teary listening to old Hindi Bollywood Songs while also finding yourself inexplicably moved by the sight of daffodils pushing through British soil in February like tiny acts of rebellion against winter.

Last week, I found myself crying over a WhatsApp video my daughter sent of Mumbai rain - proper monsoon madness, streets flooding, people wading through water with plastic bags over their heads, looking absolutely miserable and somehow completely alive. And then, two hours later, I was sitting in my Kingston garden with proper tea and biscuits, watching a robin build its nest, thinking, "This is also perfect."

Make it make sense.

The Southall Ambush

Southall is where missing home stops being a feeling and starts becoming a contact sport. You don’t go there chasing nostalgia. You go because you need decent aata (wheat flour), the kind Tesco pretends doesn't exist. You go for spices that don’t come in tiny jars labelled ‘ethnic.’ You go to remember what parathas are actually supposed to taste like.

You don’t think it’s going to get to you. You’re just there to run errands. But then you step off the bus, and something shifts.

The air smells like… home, almost. Spices you haven’t smelled properly in years, frying onions, maybe even incense from a shop somewhere down the road. And underneath all of it, something you can’t name but recognise instantly. It hits you in the gut. Like walking straight into your mum’s kitchen, back when Sundays still smelled like food and comfort.

You hear Hindi being spoken nearby - not the version you hear in Netflix shows, but the real kind. Messy, fast, full of slang. You didn’t realise how much you'd missed the sound until it was suddenly everywhere.

Aunties in shalwar kameez haggle with the same fierce precision their sisters back in Mumbai use on rickshaw drivers. It’s loud. It’s chaotic. It’s comforting. And suddenly it hits you: this isn’t home. But it’s near enough. Home-adjacent.

The Sunday Papers Revolution

But here's the thing nobody tells you about missing home: you start building new rituals without noticing. Imperceptibly, like developing wrinkles or forgetting phone numbers you once knew by heart.

Sunday papers weren't a thing in my Mumbai life. Sunday mornings were for sleeping late, then being dragged into family obligations that somehow always involved eating too much and arguing about politics while someone's cricket match provided background commentary.

Now? Sunday papers have become sacred. Not because I suddenly care deeply about British celebrity scandals or garden centre advertisements, but because it's quiet time that belongs to me. Time to read about a world I'm slowly understanding while drinking coffee that's actually strong enough to wake the dead.

My husband finds this transformation hilarious. "You've become one of those people who has 'weekend routines,'" he said last Sunday. He's not wrong. I have become one of those people. And the weirdest part? I like it.

Political Conversations I Never Thought I'd Have

Three years ago, if someone had told me I'd develop opinions about British council elections, I'd have suggested therapy. British politics felt like background noise - important to other people, irrelevant to my daily existence of trying to figure out which button on the washing machine wasn't going to turn my clothes purple.

Now I find myself actually caring about local MP elections. Not in some performative "I'm integrating" way, but genuinely. Because it turns out, when you live somewhere, the decisions made in boring council meetings actually affect your life. Revolutionary concept, I know. When I spoke about this to my mum in Mumbai, she said, "But why do you care? You're not staying forever, right?"

The question hung there like incense in a temple - sweet, heavy, impossible to ignore.

Am I staying forever? When did caring about local politics become evidence of permanent settlement? When did "I'm just here for a few years" become "I understand why people are upset about library closures"?

The News From Home Problem

It gets messy when home feels far - not just in miles, but in feeling. Sometimes I hear something’s happened back in India —floods, an election, a relative falling ill—and there’s this strange delay. Not shock. Not even sadness at first. Just… distance. And it’s not true that I don’t care. I do. But it feels like it’s happening in a version of life I’m no longer fully inside. The faces, the language, the emotion - it all looks familiar, but slightly out of focus. Like it belongs to people who used to feel like mine, in a place I used to understand without thinking. Now I need context. I need someone to explain the subtext I once knew instinctively.

Mumbai floods, political scandals, cricket victories - they all reach me through WhatsApp forwards and news apps, filtered through time zones and emotional distance. I care, but it's care with a lag, like loving someone through frosted glass.

Meanwhile, when London transport strikes affect my commute, or when local school catchment areas change, I'm immediately, personally invested. Because this affects my Tuesday. My son's education. My daily existence.

The geographic loyalty has shifted without me noticing, and it feels like betrayal and evolution simultaneously.

Building Home, Accidentally

Nobody tells you that building home in a new place isn't a conscious decision. It happens while you're busy trying to figure out where to buy decent paneer and why British people apologise to furniture when they bump into it.

Suddenly you have a favourite corner shop where the owner asks about your son's A-levels. You know which platform to wait on at Norbiton station for the fastest train to London. You've developed strong opinions about the best route to avoid tourist crowds in Richmond Park.

Your GP knows your name without checking the screen. You’ve started nodding at familiar faces in the pub down the road. And your hairdresser? Your hairdresser doesn’t panic anymore when you say “just a few layers.” She knows what you mean now. You’ve started recognising faces at the café, even get a nod from the guy at the off-license.

Nothing dramatic. Just small, everyday things that make you feel like you're part of the place. Not fully. But enough.

The Messy Truth About Loving More Than One Place

What I’m learning is this: love isn’t a limited thing. Missing Mumbai doesn’t take anything away from what I feel when I see the sun hit the kitchen tiles on a London morning. Remembering the chaos and colour of home doesn’t make the calm of this new life feel less real. They both live here now, side by side. No neat balance, no tidy resolution. Just two different kinds of love, coexisting, clashing sometimes - but both true.

Missing the noise and colour of Juhu beach doesn’t make Richmond Park feel any less calm, or less mine. There’s room for all of it. That’s the contradiction - loving more than one place fully, without having to choose between them.

My son, watching me navigate this emotional complexity, asked recently, "So which place is actually home?" And for the first time, I had an answer that felt true: "Both. Neither. It's complicated."

Home has become plural, layered, impossible to explain to people who've never had to love more than one place at once. It's garam masala in Southall and proper tea in bone china cups. It's missing monsoons while appreciating daffodils. It's feeling foreign in Mumbai's speed and foreign in London's politeness, but somehow native to both.

The Geography of the Heart

The strange thing about missing home is that it’s rarely about the place itself. It’s about time. I don’t just miss Mumbai - I miss who I was when I lived there. That easy sense of belonging. The way I could move through a room without second-guessing myself. The shorthand of shared references. There was a time I didn’t have to explain myself. Not the words I used, not the jokes I made, not the way I moved through the world. That kind of ease - the comfort of being understood without effort - I miss that more than I usually admit.

But still… I wouldn’t undo what came after.

I wouldn’t trade the first time I saw daffodils push through frozen ground, or those quiet, grey Sunday mornings with nothing but tea and the rustle of a newspaper. No horns, no voices - just stillness. I didn’t grow up with that kind of silence. I had to learn how to sit inside it.

And maybe that’s what this is. Maybe home isn’t always something you start with. Maybe it’s something you build slowly - bit by bit, mistake by mistake - until one day, it feels like yours. Not because it’s perfect, but because you stayed long enough to make space for yourself in it.

There are days I miss India so sharply it feels like mourning. And then there are moments when London feels so completely mine that the thought of leaving tightens my chest. Most of the time, I live somewhere in between - holding space for both, belonging entirely to neither. Building a life that doesn’t make much sense on paper, but somehow fits me perfectly.

Maybe that’s just how it is now. Not quite here, not fully there either. Somewhere in the middle. It’s messy, sure - but it also feels weirdly right. Like this in-between space isn’t something to fix, just something to live inside.

Because the truth is, the heart doesn’t really care about borders. It just remembers feelings, smells, faces, small joys. The paperwork might say otherwise, but none of that changes what feels like home.

Though I'll admit, I still tear up at vada pav videos. Some things, apparently, never change.