This is my house in Seoul. When I moved into it with my friends, we pulled the whole kitchen apart, built a new one, repainted all the walls, bought and built new furniture, made a small kitchen garden in the terrace and added things to it slowly.
Over time, I'd come back home to this frame and it slowly started feeling like home to me. Would I call Seoul my home, then? I would.
In an age where moving across the borders of your place of birth is the norm, most people have dual or multiple homes. We're all migrating for work, for family and for various other reasons. Seoul is the place where I built a home most recently. I also have homes in Chennai, Tours, Geneva and Mumbai.
Should the question then be what is home? What makes all of these places my home? Is it that feeling of coming home to family? Is it finding comfort in childhood memories? Is it slipping into your night socks? Is it finding your independence and living it? Is it the friends who go in and out of your home? Is it the smell of a cookies baking in the oven? Or whispers of parties that echoed late into mornings?
As James Baldwin rightly said,
“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”
Steepshot