Opinion The City and I | Everywhere I go, I am asked ‘Where are you from?’ My answer is the same — everywhere and nowhere

I often wonder what makes a city. Is it its people, its geographical features, or the architecture that holds the weight of its history? Or, is it the smaller things, a lane one walked down too many times, a café where one shared a laugh, or a bus stop where one waited every day? For me, cities are made of memories. They belong to you for a while, and then you carry them away, bubble-wrapped snow globes tucked somewhere in the cluttered attic of the mind.

Of my three decades, 20 have been spent in Shimla, the rest scattered across Chandigarh, Bangalore, Hyderabad, and now the Delhi-NCR. In none of these places, not in the city of my birth nor in the ones that adopted me for a while, have I ever felt a complete sense of belonging. I have always belonged nowhere, or maybe to a bit of everywhere.

In Shimla, the land of omniscient devs and omnipresent deodars, I often felt like a cuckoo in a borrowed nest. The dusky daughter of a Punjabi father and a Garhwali mother, I stood out not just at home but also in a state known for fair people, in skin, in lineage, and in belonging. I did not speak the language, did not share the same traditions, and while I lived in the same neighbourhoods and went to the same schools, I did not share anyone’s village.

“Where are you from?” the children at school would ask.
“Here,” I would say. “Shimla.”
“No, where is your village?”
“I don’t have one,” I would reply.
“No, where is your father from? Your grandfather?”

I never knew what to say. What about my mother, my grandmother, and my maternal grandparents? I would wonder.

My peripatetic grandparents, much like my parents, had come from different cities. My paternal grandmother arrived in India during Partition, carrying little more than a handful of stories and belongings. My grandfather and she spent their lives moving, making homes in many places. My maternal grandparents have travelled all the way from Srinagar, no not the one in Kashmir, but the one in modern-day Uttarakhand (Pauri Garhwal). I was at a loss at how to explain my hyphenated identity where homogeneity was the norm.

Preserved in memory

Still, Shimla lives preserved in memory, its green trails, the cafés where my friends and I met, the shortcuts we took everywhere, and the Mall Road with its horses and jumble of shops. It remains home on my Aadhaar and voter cards, and even though I have not lived there in years, in my memories, too.

Now, none of my friends remain in Shimla. During each of my sporadic visits, I notice how the city has changed, old haunts have vanished, and new buildings have taken their place. Shimla exists for me only in memory, buried in history and touched with a faint melancholy.

The Open Hand Monument — Chandigarh’s iconic symbol, designed by Le Corbusier to represent peace, unity, and the spirit of giving and receiving. (Express Photo)

Even after I left the hills for Panjab University in Chandigarh, a city of neat sectors and wide roads where my surname finally fit, the question followed me. Seniors, classmates, and even hostel attendants would tilt their heads and look at me like a puzzle. “Where are you from?” they would ask. It always sounded like an accusation. “You don’t look Himachali,” some would say. “You don’t sound Punjabi,” others added. Once, a flummoxed driver, smiling hopefully, asked, “Tusi Kanede ton aaye ho?” (“Have you come from Canada?”). My grandfather’s roots were here, but I remained an outsider, a eucalyptus planted among native trees, familiar and useful but never truly part of the landscape.

Far from the familiar

Then came Hyderabad, a city with which I had no familial ties. It was different, crowded and alive. The old city, with its heritage and dust, rubbed shoulders with the new one filled with glass buildings and air-conditioned malls. Here, I found social coteries divided by the “mother tongue.” I had none, but by default, I found home among the Hindi speakers.

Next came Bangalore, green and eager to embrace me. There were small shops embarrassingly called “My Aishwarya” on almost every street. I loved its weather, its cafés, Church Street that reminded me of Shimla’s Mall Road, and Ulsoor Lake that reminded me of Sukhna back in Chandigarh.

Surprisingly, not one auto driver asked me that dreaded question, “Where are you from?” Perhaps, they assumed I just belonged to the city. No one asked me to speak in Kannada either. They accepted my English just fine. Café owners remembered my usual order, and I was startled by how something so small could feel like home. I was determined to make it my home, rent and reason notwithstanding. But then my throat gave up after a pollen allergy, and I had to leave. The wise are right. Too much love can be smothering.

Delhi-NCR came last, heavily perfumed with history, with Mughal gardens, Lutyens avenues, Metro lines, and malls. It is a city I feel strangely at ease in so far, full of people with hyphenated identities and multiple homes.

In each city, I have gathered an eclectic collection of knick-knacks, which now define home: A pen stand that followed me from Shimla, a kitchen quickly assembled before lockdown in Chandigarh, a dream catcher from Hyderabad, a bookshelf from Bangalore, and the many photos and souvenirs from friends that became family along the way. Each object feels like a small monument to the cities and the people that shaped me. Each city and person I met left something behind, a habit, a word, a phrase.

I have never belonged anywhere, but everywhere left a faint fingerprint on my soul. Even as I feared that each new city would swallow me whole, I found myself clinging to the small things that felt familiar: A friend, a café, a street, a shop name that sounded like home.

“Where are you from?” It is a question that has followed me since I first became aware of the world. I still stumble, unsure what to say. Everywhere and nowhere, I think. From cities I have left behind and those that left me behind, and to others I still dream of living in someday.

I do not have a city stitched to my name, but the ones I have lived in are embroidered into my being. Perhaps that is not belonging, in the way people mean it, but it is a kind of home.

aishwarya.khosla@indianexpress.com