Home. A word that can feel both familiar and elusive at the same time.  A shelter and a longing. A necessity and a dream.

Where is home? It’s a question I’ve asked myself at different points in my life. Is it the place where I grew up? Is it the place that gave me wings to fly high? Or is it in the mountains, where I feel strangely calm?

It’s a question that has followed me everywhere. And over time, I found pieces of the answer in the most unexpected places.

Like this one time, when I was in Hanoi.

It was a quaint café. I had taken a small table in the balcony overlooking the streets and was there for a leisurely lunch. I browsed through the menu, debated over tempting options, finally ordered, and sat there watching people on the street.

People sitting on low tables, enjoying their meal of soup and conversations. Scooters hastily zipping past hurriedly. You-will-not-fail-to-notice red-coloured Vietnamese flags fluttering vigorously. And amidst all this, a girl sitting and reading. My eyes stayed on her. I knew that could be me.

My thought was interrupted by the squeaky sound of the chair moving at the table next to mine. It was a woman wearing a loose white summer dress, hair strands falling on her face as she was trying to get comfortable in the chair, she looked at me and smiled through her deep brown friendly eyes. I smiled back and then continued looking at the animated street.

She ordered quickly without giving it much thought, as though she was familiar with the menu, then she turned to me and asked if I was visiting the cafe for the first time. “Yes, I replied – this cafe and Vietnam too for the first time.”

She continued talking to me, asking about my background, why I love travelling solo, and then she came to the toughest question – which is the place that feels like home after having travelled so widely. I was surprised when the answer easily came out of me.

“There are lot of places that I like, part of me sometimes wishes that I could live there, but the place that feels like home to me is Mumbai. There’s something magical in the city that always makes me feel at ease. There is high energy in the air, people are kind, and you find dreamers everywhere in the street. I have tried living in other places, but my heart always wants to run back to Mumbai. Mumbai is the place where I feel at home. So, I think it would be fair to say that Mumbai is my home.”

She nodded her head and smiled.

“I think I can kind of understand what you are saying because I have been looking for a place to call home for a long time and now, I have finally found it here in Vietnam. I have been here for a month, and I am sure that I want to live here. Something about this place makes me feel at home, I have never felt like that in my entire life, I have always struggled with it. And this is the first time I am saying it aloud to someone.”

We both laughed. We had many things in common, though we belonged to different parts of the world – she was from Mexico, and I am from India. We were single, independent women figuring out life as we wandered in and out of our comfort zone. It almost felt like we were comparing notes about ourselves and loving the sheer commonalities that we had.

After a few hours of lunch and conversation, we hugged and parted while wishing each other whatever we longed for from life, and we both knew that we meant it with all our heart.

As I was walking back to my hotel, I kept thinking how we both had found home in different places. For me, it was a city away from where I grew up, but for her, it was many countries away. So, home can be a place that matches the vibe of the person you are. Or home can be a place that opens infinite possibilities of who you want to be.

But that is not always the case, as I got to know on my solo trip to the snowy town of Pahalgam in Kashmir.

It was a place that looked right out of a story book for children, with its snow-capped mountains, pine trees, green meadows, a river rushing along, and kids with apple cheeks. A place so pleasingly serene to the eyes that you can spend days admiring its beauty.

But the beauty sharply contrasted with the difficult lives people faced there due to years of instability from terrorist attacks and militancy.

I had found this spot in a park, which had a bench facing the mountains. I wanted to spend some time soaking in the views as it was my last day there. It was a fiercely cold January morning piercing right through the bones, so there weren’t many tourists, I had the mountains to myself, just the way I liked.

After some time, the sounds of the mountain were interrupted with a male voice – Where are you from? I turned and noticed a young boy around the age of twenty, wearing the traditional long coat called Pheran, with light brown eyes, staring at me, waiting for an answer.

“I am from Mumbai.” I replied.

“Are you travelling alone from Mumbai?”

The tone of his voice had shifted, it was rude and intrusive, but I still answered him. “Yes, I am.”

And then, without warning, all his uncensored thoughts poured out on to me, shattering the peaceful silence that was surrounding me until then.

“You people are so lucky; you’ll can do whatever you want. Look at you, you are even travelling by yourself. Look at me, I am stuck here. I don’t have the luxury to travel like you. I can’t even do what I want. I want to go somewhere, but my parents don’t let me. This is my home, and I am stuck here.”

Saying that he just walked away from me, as if I was the bitter reminder of something that he wanted to stay far away from. I had no chance to complete that conversation, and even if I had, I wouldn’t know what to say. The intensity of his anger made me uneasy.

Here was someone who was so resentful of his home. He felt trapped and stifled there. He wanted to break free and run away to another place. He wanted more out of life, which he didn’t get there. And years of anger and disappointment and had come lashing out on me.

At first, it disturbed me, but then as I sat there gazing at the mountains, reflecting upon it, I somehow empathized with him. I realized that the ‘home’ I often romanticized was not the same for him. It was a place he longed to escape.

In that moment, the idea of home felt more fluid and complex than I had ever imagined.

Perhaps home is something everyone is seeking. It’s a quiet longing hidden inside us that guides us through life. And we all hope that one day when we find it, our hearts will finally breathe easy.