Home... What is Home?

Is ‘home’, my ancestral village located in the vicinity of Jalandhar, East Panjab - a place so very far away but a place that has given life and sustained the livelihoods of my ancestors and no doubt, this may also have been the place of my birth had circumstances of the past been different.

Is ‘home’, the homeland of my ancestors as a whole - the Panjab, a land where one will now find a ‘border’ isolating & separating two fields of wheat and two sets of people that were perhaps one before a certain time. A land i have only gazed upon twice with my very own eyes many, many years ago - sights that are now simply unrecognisable.

Is Panjab, the very same Panjab as depicted in the many films featuring Harbhajan Mann, where the fields of sugarcane glisten before sunset, a place where the elders sit and play cards whilst the sons of the soil tend to their daily jobs in the fields only to be visited by the daughters of the soil who brings along a fresh Panjabi meal consisting of Roti, Sabji & Lassi at noon?

Or were these all fragments of the imagination or a depiction of a time that simply vanished before ones very own eyes, a time before state sponsored terrorism became the norm, with the disappearances of both daughters & sons of the soil leaving families totally distraught. A place where the lightbulbs of the hearts of many just simply cracked, never to be replaced or rejuvenated.

Or is home, the streets of Walsall, the streets I know only too well? A town inhabited by many who once called Panjab their home once upon a time as did my Grandparents and my Mother.

But these streets are different, they’re very unique, for the sight of a Sikh Sardar (Gentlemen) is never far away with the appearance of a Beige, Maroon or Yellow coloured Pagh simply a norm in these streets.

And so, is home what our minds make of it, a place filled with eternal illumination as humankind thrives under the watchful eye of the bright star we call the sun and the ever looming moon?

A Sikh Sardar walking under the watchful eye of the moon