✴︎ now this

a short piece about my first ever home, adapted for an open mic reading, from a much longer piece about home.

first performed in atlanta in august 2025.

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Today, I’d like to take you all home. 

Now, I don’t mean that I want to literally take you to my actual home, and I promise I’m not flirting with you. I want to take you to a very special home, the first home I’ve ever known, the one that’s so old that it’s never been hooked up to the wifi, the one I haven’t visited in over 10 years but remember it like it was yesterday. 

I’m talking about my grandparents’ house, and I refer to it that way because my parents moved us away from the ‘multi-family’ home to live outside India when I was 4, so I mostly visited it during my summer holidays. We lived on the third level of the three storey building – my grandparents, parents, my brother, my great aunt, an uncle and aunt, two cousins, and me – who has probably spent the least amount of time in that house.

Residing in the dusty lanes in the heart of old Delhi, this home had the remnants of a horse stable and a cow shed as you entered the premises. I have vague memories of an animal still residing there when I was little, ultimately relinquishing its spot for the cars that needed parking. The first and second floors belonged to another great uncle, and they had an actual well dug into one of the rooms – but that’s a story for another day. 

I want to take you up the stairs, to the third floor, with a quick pitstop to admire – or be scared, as I was – of the marble bust of my great great great? grandfather. He remains a solid memory, literally, whenever this house is mentioned in the company of extended family, the gleaming white marble and empty eyes set in front of a moonlit window – I couldn’t make this up if i tried!

The main entrance led into a foyer, with the entrances to the two families’ living spaces at each end of this hallway. I won’t give you the full tour because I don’t think that’s covered in the price of today’s ticket, but I will tell you some things that made this house truly special.

Let’s talk about the fact that this house was clearly designed to be communal – if you started in the hallway, you could take a tour of the entire house starting with one of the washrooms, which led into my parents room, which led into my grandparents’ room, which led into a bathroom, which led into a kitchen, which led into a tiny open space with a little swing for us kids, that then led into my uncle’s room, which led into their bathroom, which led into their kitchen, which led into my great aunt’s room, and that brought us right back into the hall. Around the world in 80 days has nothing over ‘around the Jain household in 80 seconds’. You’ll notice I didn’t use the word bathroom and washroom interchangeably, and I said that the bathrooms led to the kitchens. 

This is because…well because it’s technically true. Of the three washrooms in the house, only one had a toilet. The other two were simply actual places to wash yourself, a room with a basin and another tap lower on the floor. I think this is because of historic cultural sanitation rules which did not allow toilets inside the home, to avoid any contamination to India’s two greatest gods – religion and food. It also made sense to have the bathroom and kitchen next to each other because of efficient plumbing, hello!

So where did everyone go to do their business?

Well I could leave that to your imagination, but we’ve been on this journey together so far, and I don’t want to leave you hanging. The original – and only – toilet was built outside the house, next to the main entrance. My mom tells me that she refused to share a toilet with the entire family, and insisted on another one being built. It was ultimately built to be accessed from my parents’ room, but also from the main hallway, because didn’t I tell you that you could visit every room in the house through another room?

So that was my first home, which is still an important part of my identity – literally, because it’s still listed on my Indian identity card. But also because I have some truly special core memories of this home – the green mosaic on the floor, a loud cooler that did absolutely nothing to provide respite from Delhi’s overbearing heat, the TV alternating between Bollywood music and devotional songs sung with the same passion, the living room which was at the centre of it all, but was rarely used because it was too formal, a duster made of peacock feathers to drive away lizards, the one spot in the entire house that got some wifi from the office in the courtyard, my aunt’s romance novels, my mom’s stilettos from another time hidden away in a drawer, my great aunt’s potted plants lining the terrace, the smell of my grandmother’s favourite red ointment that apparently cured all aches and pains. 

None of this is ever going to come back, yet all of it still feels so real. No one lives in that house anymore, but I’ve gone back to see the building twice in the last 11 years – my brother and I both felt it important for our partners to know where we came from. And even without actually stepping into the house, just taking the turn into that dusty lane in the heart of old Delhi felt like going home.