The Scent of Belonging
A reflection on history contained in objects and the inevitability of belonging felt for places unknown. Written by Fareeba Ansari.
I am homesick for places I have not known. It is quite an odd feeling, for how can one identify a deep recognition with somewhere they have never set foot before? Somewhere one has never sensed before, but knows the secret winding paths leading to places all too familiar in memory.
My homesickness comes from a particular scent lingering in my house, encaged between the walls, and I interpret it as belonging. As a child, I failed to understand why my parents held on to so many things that never seemed to find a final resting place within my home. Almost every corner has a box with a label that holds multiple objects, books, and knickknacks of all kinds; some rusted, some aged far more than others, some missing parts and others whole but broken down. I used to think my parents just liked collecting things and didn’t want to part with the trinkets and possessions, but as I grew older, the papers strewn with words that I once could not decipher began to unravel history.
It did not take long to identify they had a scent. I naturally felt drawn to what the smell could indicate, and I found my answers when I touched the piles of books, documents, and trinkets my ancestors had left behind.
There’s an old record player and radio, wooden and sleek from the top with rusted knobs to increase the volume and change channels. I wonder how many times Dadababa has sat by it and spent his mornings or afternoons listening to the tunes of his time. I wonder what it felt like for him, the world he knew and the places he had seen. Where had this music box been made, who made it, what road did it take to arrive at the shop it was sold at and how my grandfather came across it.
It is not the walls of my house that signify belonging, rather, all the objects, papers, books, and trinkets of various sizes beckoning me with their scent to places I imagine would be home. I splay them across the floor, they formulate an intricately woven map: the stories my grandmother wrote in Sindhi tracing a path all across the Sindh province, marking down different plot lines from her travels after she married my Dadababa. The VCR tapes from his father’s expeditions and work events taking me deeper into the heart of Sindh, marking places and people I do not know. This map doesn’t limit itself to Pakistan and goes far beyond, traversing into the Arabian Peninsula and tracing my ancestry there. My grandmother’s lineage takes me all the way to Georgia, back when it was more commonly known as Gurjistan. It fits into a sense of belonging, not because there are ties to these places, but because there are markings of lives having been lived and stories of those lives and the roads taken to arrive at Karachi on this map of mine —all wrapped up in the form of things.
When we assume the ancestral heritage of our fathers, we forget we have a place to belong that comes from our mothers. I never heard much about the land across the Durand Line, and I have always wondered if therein lies a world that is unknown to me. I am sure there is home there too; people I have yet to know, livelihood I have yet to see and make my own.
What I have are the possessions my maternal grandfather left my mother and her sisters, and the stories she tells me. I place down the scarce objects my mother has collected. In that case, the map further expands —my finger trancing Afghanistan, where my Nanababa migrated from, finding love in Peshawar, and marrying my nani. Her family lineage widens the map into India, a place where relations are strained in today’s political conditions, but there is belonging there too.
The homesickness settles against my ribs once again, tugging towards where they have been.
I gaze at this map made up entirely of the things my ancestors have left behind, and I find myself wondering how I, as a person, hold ties to so many places without having been to many of them myself. I know of them like I know of my city, I know of the neighbourhoods that existed there once, and I know the stories of the people who lived there. I know particularities one can only know having been a part of those places themselves, and at the same time I know very little because the soles of my feet have not walked upon the ground there, my hands have not touched the architecture of these locations, and I have not seen the paths that were taken to get here.
You are all the fragments of your ancestors and the lands they walked upon, everywhere and nowhere at the same time; you are an amalgamation of all the things that have belonged.Despite so many regions being marked down as unfavourable to cross over, for various conditions and circumstances, the threads weaving pathways across the map created by all the possessions in my house do it anyway. The threads are not fearless, but they are determined.
I hold history in my hands when I pick up any of these things. I never had the opportunity to sit down and ask my grandparents about the lands their parents crossed when they first left their homes, for I was too young to ask such critical questions, or my grandparents had passed away too soon. But the scent emanating from all they have left behind has been informative enough to send me on a search for belonging that is not tethered to one place.
I feel as though I am not tethered to one place. There are places I feel a pull towards though I cannot be sure what I would find should I arrive there someday.
People prefer to call things and objects memorabilia, but they are far more than that. The issue I take with the definition of memorabilia is that it ends up limiting the scope of history contained within an object. When I am holding the pen my great-grandfather used to sign all his documents during the time of the British Raj, it is almost an injustice not to recognise all the places that pen has been to, as well. On its own, that pen, though it may no longer work for it has settled itself well into history from so many years of use and accumulated rust of the years it was unused, has been present in a time where the land and culture and people were all so different from how they are known today.
The safarnamas my Bibi Amma wrote and the little stories she crafted are indicative of the histories that took place in the places she wrote about, and were carried on through the pages she held in her hands as she noted down her family history. I imagine it the same as looking at a pair of shoes and turning them over to find the soles worn down and realising the pair of shoes have been walked around in so many places, and the kind of life the past owner of those shoes might have lived and all the places they wore those shoes. And as easily, the word memorabilia does not do the object justice.
The history our ancestors leave behind for us in the form of objects and so many other things bear the same weight; they establish themselves and the roads they have taken to reach where they are now. Belonging ties into these objects because they are fragments of a larger picture, and without which their true value would remain unknown, unrecognised.
People come and go from places all the time. As humans, we seldom live stagnant lives; there are always things we need to do, responsibilities that need to be taken up. And the collections of our having been end up piled into one corner. It doesn’t seem like much while the present continues, but when people leave for somewhere new, what gets left behind is the history contained in those things, within the physical pieces collected overtime from our having been somewhere, anywhere, cementing the belonging within them.
It is a fickle thing to make note of, that today while I go about my life buying something new and soon enough replacing it with another new purchase, my things will mark down my presence. When someday they are passed down, they will become indicators of history, much like the pair of sunglasses my phuppo gave me which she wore around her trip to Barcelona and Greece, or the necklace with my mother’s name printed on it, given to her by her father which rests snugly around my sister’s neck. Each of these different objects coming together and identifying a scent of belonging of their own.
It is far greater to know that even for my grandparents, their possessions may not have been observed as something which could ever amount to being so monumentally meaningful. When my fingers feel the textures of what belonged to them, places, people and memories become all the more familiar to me.
The belonging I am partaking in is ongoing. The map I am charting has only just begun, and looking at the seldom locations pinned down on it makes me wonder what remembrance and nostalgia would be like if there were not things, no heirlooms, no trinkets and objects or possessions for people to leave behind. How else would we know that someone has been there if it were not for the belonging that is so deeply woven into what we touch and carry with us?
The absence of someone who was once there, whether they moved to another city or country, or simply that they are no longer with us in the world, it is once again the things which speak of who they once were. There isn’t a possibility to return to a place and find it to be the same as you had exactly left it, but within what has originated from the place and been owned, there are remnants of that time, perfectly secure.
It is the stories tightly knit into the objects permeating belonging which make an account of history that may not have been heard before.
I could literally visualize each aspect of their lives that you mentioned, the way you speak about them really shows the connection you have with your forefathers/mothers. Amazing work!