Opinion Who’s My Neighbour: From Jorhat to Delhi to London, home is defined by relationships, not geography

Her buffalo, Khudmai, had calved again. Boloram, the mate, stood guard, while Poundrak, their firstborn, nudged at his new sister, Jeuti, still unsteady on her legs. In my ancestral village, even buffaloes are kin, their births marked in kitchens and courtyards with the same joy as human children.

That afternoon, after lunch, I heard feet pounding the staircase — Tora, my neighbour’s college-going daughter, running upstairs in infectious delight. She had won the contract to do makeup for the village bhaona (folk theatre) — Nrisingha Murari, a drama about Narasimha (half man-half lion), the fiercest avatar of Lord Vishnu. In Assam, bhaona is not just theatre but devotion and community, and for a young girl to be chosen as the makeup artist is no small achievement. Every visit I make from Delhi, my luggage carries brushes and palettes she has requested — small tokens that carry her dreams to the stage.

These are my neighbours in Jorhat. Not just people next door, but companions in every rhythm of life. They come to me with petitions for pensions, school admissions, land disputes. I write letters for them to government offices, sign affidavits and argue their case in the official language. It is a web of intimacy spun over 14 generations.

And yet, I am not only of Jorhat. My main home is Delhi, where life might seem anonymous to outsiders. But for me, Delhi is anything but lonely. I married into a Punjabi family with sprawling networks of cousins, uncles, and aunts. Every month, there is a gathering — a birthday, an anniversary, or simply a reason invented to meet. In Delhi, my neighbours are often my husband’s cousins and boyhood friends, now scattered across the city but always close at hand. Their warmth gives me a safety net. It is precisely because I have this back-up, this hearth that will not collapse in my absence, that I enjoy the freedom to be a nomad, moving between Delhi and Assam.

Still, when I think of “neighbours” in the truest sense — not kin, but companions of circumstance — my mind returns to Jorhat. Here, neighbourliness is not an abstract virtue but a daily practice. They are the people who greet me at the gate before I’ve even set down my suitcase, who remember my childhood quirks, who call me because they know I will help them draft that stubborn government application. It is the continuity of lives lived side by side, across centuries, with no thought of where one family ends and another begins. A Utopian community, perhaps, but one so real that I feel deeply blessed to belong to it.

And then there are neighbours who arrive from nowhere, and still become unforgettable.

Years ago, when I was studying in London, my next-door neighbour in the university dorm was Sabrina, a Brazilian student. She came from South America, I from India, yet oceans shrank in the narrow corridor we shared. In that cold and alien city, we became family. She would knock on my door with her infectious laughter, we would share food from our homelands, and on hard days, we leaned on each other. To this day, Sabrina remains one of the most unforgettable neighbours of my life.

Across Jorhat, Delhi, and London, the thread is the same: Intimacy. Especially in my ancestral home in Assam, neighbours are not just people in adjacent houses — they are custodians of memory, sharers of daily life, and participants in every joy and sorrow. These are not just neighbours, but anchors — reminders that home is not geography but relationship.

So when I ask myself who my neighbours are, I think of buffalo births and bhaona rehearsals, of cousins in Delhi and Brazilian friends in London. Lives flowing into mine, asking nothing but giving everything. For me, neighbourliness is the rhythm of shared life — the most enduring inheritance of all.

The writer is a fashion consultant and education entrepreneur, currently pursuing a PhD in cultural memory and translation studies