I GOT a free upgrade to first class, but the aircraft seats were so angled towards the windows that I could not make eye contact with those who were making their way to the coach. Otherwise, it was an enjoyable and auspicious start to my life as a homeless person.
I plan to wander across five advanced economies on visitor visas, slipping into India now and then for work and to take all the love from the people who would give it, and leave again. The countries that offer visas on arrival for Indians are exactly the sort of places I don’t want to pass through, except Thailand, for I cannot bear to see anymore the mess of humans in the throes of ‘development,’ though no place I know is as unsightly and unhealthy as my mothership. I wander not to ‘explore’ myself, nor do any other thing that narcissists do in the guise of spirituality. Nor am I lost or seeking meaning, because I am of sound mind, though some unkind exes may contest that. Oddly, the only thing I feel that has meaning is a home and the people inside it, but if it is over or you don’t have it for any reason, you should not make a second-best home. People seek their best case scenario, but when they don’t find it they think that the second best option should be a diminished version of best. But this is in the root of all failure and strife. A second-best option is usually not a diminished version of the best. It is a completely different one. For instance, the second-best option to home might be the absence of home.
I will be working as usual, and doing everything I used to do in Gurugram, but in beautiful and clean places. In any case, what is the meaning of ‘home’ in 2026? I won’t say this to an immigration officer, but I will to everyone else.
The whole world seems to be uprooted. The poor are fleeing their villages where they have land and respect but no work. The young, in beautiful places, want to flee their parents. The middle class has been hopping cities and countries, filled with hope and despair. Even when the going was good, when rich nations begged them to come, they were homesick. An underrated reason for the first wave of Asian nationalism was homelessness, when the cultural elite left pampered lives that were subsidized by the poor, their egos nourished by inequality, and they became the new underclass. They developed an exaggerated love for their culture.
My first introduction to foreigners was through their mysterious homelessness. Because it was through cinema. Almost all American heroes of the 1980s were solitary, and they hailed from elsewhere. Rocky, for instance, lived alone. The in a rented house. The boxer was rootless. One reason for that, I figure now, is that in the first draft of a screenplay, characters usually are solitary because it is easier, especially for inexperienced writers, to write a single central character with minimal interactions than to fill the story with equal characters. And something of that isolation survives the drafts. Also, in the eighties urban America was perhaps truly rootless. All that has changed now. Characters in American cinema today seek home and belonging, even Deadpool.
But a happier homelessness, too, has emerged. The richest people are leaving their old homes like never before. Rich Americans are fleeing to Europe, Dubai and Singapore. Henley Private Wealth Migration Report 2025 states that 16,500 millionaires quit the UK as their primary place of residence. The latest luxury product appears to be leaving home. And like some things the rich do, you don’t need to be as rich to do what they do, especially in matters concerning freedom. Money buys freedom but money is not the only thing that can buy it.
Rich Indians, too, appear to be leaving. They are buying citizenships, especially in Europe. But most of them don’t really quit home. They are just buying the option to flee.
When I lampoon the ₹100-crore flats of Gurugram that stand in the smog, how the richest in India still have to breathe poison, people tell me those penthouses are just “among the many homes” of the rich. But a home is a singular thing. It is where a person feels at home, usually in a swarm of people who are all nailed to the reassurance of a single familiar town. They may take their home with them to another location briefly, but their home is one thing. Either people have one home or none at all. There’s no other choice.
A deliberately homeless person is in a state of happy exile. When I read the poetic laments of refugees who have lost their home to occupiers, I have a better sense of who I am at this moment—the anti-refugee, the exact opposite of the dispossessed, a person who has access to home and flees from it.
Maybe the only way for me to love home is if someone denies me my right to enter it. But that is not what I fear, for what are the chances? What I fear is that India will sabotage my escape, pulling me back in. Home is a gravitational force. It’s not easy to escape it.
Many years ago, my train had stopped in a small town in Tamil Nadu. A pretty transgender woman, probably 20 years old like me, got in and sat next to me. She looked nervous and kept looking out the window. She was fleeing. As the train moved, she began to look joyful. But then a gang of burly transgender folks appeared, beat her up and dragged her away. I think of that moment when I see the poor of India trying to escape their circumstances valiantly, against the odds. There are forces that hold them back. I feel something like that may happen to me too, some long arm of India will grab me and draw me back. But I will fight with all I have.
Every five years, we become zombies. And we need to do something extraordinary. Not wise, but extraordinary Some people have children. Some just leave home.
(Manu Joseph’s latest book is ‘Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us’.)
Posts
0 Comments