Home away from home

Avni Gandhi

The spicy aromas of her grandmother’s cooking, mixed with the sweet perfume of freshly brewed milky tea floated around the room. A cold gust of wind filtered through the window, cutting across sophomore Avni Gandhi’s face. She shivered. Tucking the blanket underneath her, she huddled closer to her cousin as the stationary ceiling fans above her creaked in the breeze. 

The chilly December air found her entire family bundled in layers of clothing and blankets, and even then, the cold seemed to find a way in. Gandhi was sprawled on a sleeping bag on the ground in a tangled mess of her six cousins’ limbs and blankets. Her uncles sat stiffly on one corner of the queen bed with her grandfather, and her aunts and grandmother lied on mounds of pillows opposite their husbands, siphoning off of each other’s body heat and tightly wrapping their jackets around themselves. 

On this particular night, Gandhi’s entire family had gathered in one room at her grandparents’ home in Jaipur. Her mother’s three siblings had travelled from Udaipur and Mumbai, and now, the entire extended family lay cramped in one room as crackly old Bollywood music from her grandfather’s outdated stereo punctuated her family’s shouts in Hindi.

As her grandfather crouched over a game of Subway Surfers on his phone, the rest of the family joked and teased each other good-naturedly. They praised Gandhi’s oldest cousin for her erudition and good grades and fawned over her youngest cousin, the five-year-old baby of the family. They fondly recalled Gandhi’s older brother’s adventures in India as a child and how Gandhi and her cousin sister used to insist on wearing the same clothes everywhere they went. 

As the night snaked into the early hours of the morning, Gandhi dropped her head on her cousin’s shoulder and closed her eyes. She drank in the sounds of her family’s voices and the smoky smell of India. She felt peaceful and whole — the love around her seemed to spill from her family’s voices and wrap her in a tight embrace. 

“I felt so happy and so loved,” Gandhi said. “I was so excited to eat my grandma’s food and sit there and talk to my grandma, my grandpa, my cousins and my aunts and uncles. Everyone, even my little baby cousin, was huddled around me and it was like a big group hug. I felt like I had returned home.”