Homebound

The word ‘home’ is just not a place confined with four walls, one roof and one floor, it is every individual’s only safe destination to go when all other alternatives for life and survival have run out. But returning to home is not easy for everyone especially for those, who have left their safe heaven just to survive and protect their family from poverty, joblessness, and hunger. Homebound is a novel by Puja Changoiwala, a renowned journalist which depicts the story of those people who had started for their home but never arrived back. This novel is a written portrayal of the world through the eyes of Meher, a 15 years old girl, living in Dharavi with her migrant worker father, mother, and a little brother. Meher through her eleven letters written to journalist Mrs. Farah , keeps reminding us about the journey of the Indian migrants workers , who walked miles after miles “fleeing the cities they built, walking under the stars and the sun, in a trickle, in a flood, in the dead of the world” during the first lockdown in 2020.

In 2020, Covid-19 was spreading its tentacles all over the world and caused enormous agony and death in the distant regions of our world. India with its large population density compared to other parts of the world ,was faced with a critical situation. In order to stop the outbreak, on March 24, 2020, the Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi, announced the first phase of complete lockdown for 21 days throughout the nation keeping 1.3 billion people inside their homes and leaving them lost and confused. We were instructed to be at our houses and restrict ourselves from going out until an emergency situation comes up. But people like Meher’s father were devastated as staying at home was a privililage they could not afford.Left with little alternative many like him decided to move back ‘home’ and this led to a large movement of people in the midst of the pandemic. This movement was questioned as detrimental to the larger interest of society but often the people on the move had no other option. This novel responds to the question of this necessity among the migrant workers who had lost their jobs and amenities to pay rent,or buy food.

The story starts with the narrative of Meher, for whom the slum Dharavi was a place where she is allowed to dream about her future. While her origin, ‘Balhaar’ village located in Rajasthan has no schooling facilities beyond grade seven and a poor teacher student ratio, Mumbai was the place where she can think of attending college and becoming “the first graduate of the family”. The outbreak of Corona virus snatched her dreams and put her family in “unemployment, homelessness, starvation and death”. Thus, with some minimum amount of savings, their journey to home begins because “Balhaar, meanwhile poses only one danger for now: loss of work.” The novel gives a glimpse of the early days of lockdown with Dharavi people sinking in debts, surviving the blind blows of the cops for going out in search of paths that leads to home. Soon they found that the city Mumbai is of ‘irons and the ironies. The city they had build was now disowning them. As the story evolves, we find that Meher was not able to reach her home, her father along with other workers kept in jail for rioting. In the meantimeMeher faced a lot of trouble in terms of virus, distance and a urge to avoid attention. Humor is included by Changoiwala throughout her work, particularly in the character names. For instance, a Dharavi family’s names are based on the personalities of subatomic particles. Hence, a hopeful neighbour is Proton Uncle, his uneasy wife is Electron Auntie, and their kid, a mediocre classmate of the protagonist, is Neutron. Reader acquires an idea about how the unprivileged planned for resource constraint, escaped from cops and made a trade off between their dreams and survival because their “remaining world was too cheap for sale” so they abandoned it easily. Author also portrays how poverty, family responsibilities led Meher’s father, her ‘Candy Kaka’ to this world of uncertainty and how Dharavi became their” Small homes, big dreams”. The sensation of abandonment and melancholy that come with leaving behind the familiar surroundings—such as the possibility of missing a particular occasion there or, ironically, not being allowed to use the public restrooms—are well captured by the author. Nevertheless, strangely enough, a depiction of Dharavi comes through. As Meher’s father says “Tragedy is obligatory in Dharavi, not misery.”

This novel is a written document of all that dark incidence which leaves a question about how a virus, hit the unprivileged. Through this whole novel the author gives us a definition of home , where “fear dies” , where “solidarity dwells” and where “love begets love”. “It’s where all journeys begins and end, where we all belong ,where we can leave and know that we shall still belong”.

Title: Homebound
Author: Puja Changoiwala
Published by: HarperCollins
P-ISBN: 978-93-5489-055-0
Year: 2021
Length: 288pages; Price: Rs. 599.00

References:

1. Book Review: ‘Homebound’ Makes Sure We Don’t Forget the 2020 Migrant Crisis by Sonia Ghalian. https://thewire.in/books/homebound-puja-changoiwala-book-review

2. Homebound’ is non-fiction masquerading as a novel about a migrant family’s plight during Covid-19 by Yash Daiv. https://scroll.in/article/1013095/homebound-is-non-fiction-masquerading-as-novel-about-a-migrant-familys-plight-during-covid-19

3. Migrant Workers’ Exodus During Lockdown: A Tragedy of Mass Scale.https://www.outlookindia.com/national/migrant-workers-exodus-during-lockdown-a-tragedy-of-mass-scale–news-83110

4. Puja Changoiwala, Homebound, New Delhi, HarperCollins India, 2021.

5. Revisiting Lockdown: The First Seven Days Of The ‘New Normal’, https://www.outlookindia.com/national/revisiting-lockdown-the-first-seven-days-of-the-new-normal–news-188093

Reviewed by: Sharanya Bhattacharya
Intern Asia in Global Affairs

The originality of the content and the opinions expressed within the content are solely the author’s and do not reflect the opinions and beliefs of the website.