Home? Where is home?

Is it made? Does it come along without us doing something for it or do we have to create it? Is it connection, rhythm, knowing? Is it where you are born or where you choose to live? Is it a smell, a taste, a feeling? How constant is it? Can I find it in myself? Is the outside just a reflection of my inner feeling of being at home with myself? Can it be anywhere, in any country, in a hotel room, a candle lit hut, under a tree, in a renovated room in Berlin, on the road between here and nowhere?

I sometimes listen to myself using the word in different contexts. Sometimes even after a day at a friend's place when asking him if „we want to go home“, meaning: to go to his place, which is a home for him and has become one for me.

I started feeling at home in Pakistan. In Rawalpindi. In old Lalazar, near the Tulsa Road. It maybe came when I started to know the route for the taxi at night, when I knew which chowk to turn at and when the tailors in the next street open in the morning. Maybe it began the day when I didn't think about the strange fact any more that I was in Pakistan, going to a foreign university, but just grabbed my stuff and ran out of the house, draping my dupata around me, thinking about which uni text I had forgotten to read.

Home is a rhythm of coming and going. The smell of paint. The taste of pharatha, egg-omlett and chai in the morning. The hugs from people I love. Juggling at night in my room, watching the lights of the nightly Rawalpindi out in the window reflections. Talking with the taxi drivers in Urdu. Enduring hours of not wanting to be there, to do this and that and at the end finding out that I just loved it. Just the way it was.