Fractured Glass

It was the headmaster at school who had pointed out to me that the word home in the English language was not the same as the word house.

“Where you live is your home and not your house,” he had said, “what is home in your language?”

His words had touched a nerve and made me think. In Gujarati, house and home are both called ghar – meaning abode. There are many words for abode like ‘makaan’, ‘nivas’ ‘sadan’ but the most commonly used word is ghar. It had never occurred to me that house and home were not the same. Until 1972 my house in Uganda had also been my home – it was a place where I thought I belonged and that place belonged to me.

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