Summer vacations are sure to indulge you in nostalgia about visiting a relative’s home, your parents’, often a grandparent’s. Let Spark take you down that journey once again, with our May issue themed ‘Home’! We hope you enjoy – as much as we did – discovering the many emotions – wonderful, cosy, complex – that home evokes.
We all leave our homes to look for better opportunities, explore other lives and fulfil our ambitions. However, somewhere deep inside us stays fledgling remains of worlds we call our home. ARTOHUS writes a poem that reflects on the nostalgia one feels for home when one is away from it.
An old woman who has spent all her life in her ancestral home in Kerala tells us how her home used to be one with her- living and breathing with her in the verdant environs. When she returns after a brief stay with her son in a distant metropolis she finds her old home struggling for breath in its altered surroundings. How will they – the house and the old woman – overcome this difficult situation? Indu Parvathi writes a short story.
This piece is a reflection on what the city of Chennai means to Vaishnavi. It is an attempt to capture the essence of the city as she knows it. This piece is personal; it is about her Chennai, her home: the memories evoked, the emotions elicited and what home means.
From the window of a new house, occupied briefly to transform it into a home with sundry ceremonies, the narrator observes a Silver Oak magnanimously offer itself as a space to be. Anna Chandy’s poem is about another notion of home.
Who makes a home? When does a house become a home? And when does one truly mentally ‘move on’ from the home she grew up in, to build her own home? Vani Viswanathan ponders, but has no answers!
Pitambar Naik’s poem rues the debilitating effect that urbanization has had on the homes of millions of people.
Sunaina Jain’s poem captures a yearning for the lost ‘home’ and is filled with reminiscences of childhood memories spent in a countryside home. It is also an indictment of the spirit-crushing, maddening and monotonous city life.
