That was our first home. Before I felt like an island in an ocean, before Calcutta, before everything that followed. You know it wasn’t a home at first but just a shell. Nothing ostentatious but just a rented two-room affair, an unneeded corridor that ran alongside them, second hand cane furniture, cheap crockery, two leaking faucets, a dysfunctional doorbell, and a flight of stairs that led to, but ended just before the roof (one of the many idiosyncrasies of the house), secured by a sixteen garrison lock, and a balcony into which a mango tree’s branch had strayed. The house was in a building at least a hundred years old and looked out on a street and a tenement block across it. The colony, if you were to call it a colony, had no name. The house itself was seedy, decrepit, as though a safe-keeper of secrets and scandals. It had many entries and exits and it was possible to get lost in it. And in a particularly inspired stroke of whimsy architectural genius, it was almost invisible from the main road like H.G. Wells’ ‘Magic Shop’. As a result, we had great difficulty when we had to explain our address to people back home. It went somewhat like this, ‘.. take the second one from the main road….and then right after turning left from Dhakeshwari, you will see a bird shop (unspecific like that, for it had no name either)… walk straight in and take the stairs at the end to go to the first floor, that’s where we dwell… but don’t press the bell, knock… and don't walk too close to the cages unless you want bird-hickeys…’’(' Left from Dhakeshwari'). Kunal Sen
For the two of us, home isn't a place. It is a person. And we are finally home.
-
Stephanie Perkins
The desire to go home that is a desire to be whole, to know where you are, to be the point of intersection of all the lines drawn through all the stars, to be the constellation-maker and the center of the world, that center called...
-
Rebecca Solnit
We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there.
-
Pascal Mercier
Home wasn't a set house, or a single town on a map. It was wherever the people who loved you were, whenever you were together. Not a place, but a moment, and then another, building on each other like bricks to create a solid shelter...
-
Sarah Dessen
A home filled with nothing but yourself. It's heavy, that lightness. It's crushing, that emptiness.
-
Margaret Atwood
More Quotes By Kunal Sen
Why weren’t you beautiful? That would’ve solved everything.’(' Left from Dhakeshwari')
Back then, come July, and the blazers would again make their way out of the steel trunks and evenings would be spent looking at snow-capped mountains from our terrace and spotting the first few lights on the hills above. It was the time for radishes...
The last thing Farinoush did on several nights just before she went to bed was to rummage through her cardboard box of old things looking for him. And there he invariably remained, nestled forever between a copy of ‘Jana Aranya’ and ‘The Hours’. She read...
In those hours when the night is still dark and cold, we see Alokananda waking up to the faint sound of stifled sobs. The sheets besides her are creaseless, sleepless. She gets up silently, her body: blank, a patchwork of frugal impulses. She gathers the...
I had no eyelashes left. So when I cried, the tears rolled down, unabated to my mouth. My saliva tasted those days, like a salt lake. Or so he said.'(' Left from Dhakeshwari')
