Home is where the heart is

Rishabh Kochhar

Leaving one’s home is never easy, especially when one has to bid adieu to a house that has been one’s home for a long time. But with my father’s recent retirement from the PGIMER, Chandigarh, we said goodbye to the house given to him for his public service — a house where we spent the last 20 years. 

As such, I never got a chance to appreciate the sprawling lawn that we had in our compound. It was only after I moved to Mumbai and started paying a small fortune for the privilege of a barely-there balcony, that I understood how blessed I was to have a house with a lawn in Chandigarh.  

Ironically, it was only during the pandemic, when I moved back to Chandigarh after almost a decade that I forged my closest relationship with the house. With nowhere else to go during the lockdown, I fell in love with the trees that adorned our backyard and blessed us with the sweetest fruits every year. Each day, I would look forward to feeding the birds that made our backyard their home, including a ferocious kite that would swoop down in the early hours for a drink of water. I often used to joke that our house was a jungle, but indulging in nature photography was an absolute joy. 

It was on a visit to a museum at Pierre Jeanneret’s house that I realised that our house was among the first few built in Chandigarh, designed in the distinct architectural style that was characteristic of the vision that Jeanneret and Le Corbusier had for Chandigarh — complete with a fireplace, neat shelves for displaying photographs and artefacts, and the elegant bricked curtains in the verandahs. I had been reliving Chandigarh’s history without even realising it.

It will take us some time to settle into our new house, but what I miss the most are the encounters with all the people I used to meet on my morning walks in the park right behind our house — starting with the roadside tea seller to the elderly gentleman who could be seen waiting with his granddaughter for her school bus outside the park, and the shopkeepers who treated us like their extended family. 

Over the last two decades, we planted several trees in our lawn. Interestingly, we once had a visitor who introduced himself as a former resident of the house. When we invited him inside for tea, he regaled us with stories of his own childhood there. Before seeing him off, we gave him a box of mangoes from our backyard, only to discover that his family had planted the mango trees. Over the next several years, other families will forge their bonds with the house. I only hope that we are treated to some mangoes from our beloved trees when we drop by for a nostalgia-filled visit a few years down the line.

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