In my heart, I'm meant for a home, not a hotel

Travel. It's magic. You plan it months in advance, book tickets meticulously, spend hours researching.

Or one night you look at the phone and see your boss calling at 11pm. Something in you snaps and you say fuck it to everything and throw some clothes in a bag and take off.

Either way, it's good. It frees the soul from shackles it didn't even know existed. For a while, you can be anyone, do anything. And you can fall in love.

Crazy, reckless, giddy love. Again and again and again. With different people, because you can be a different person each time. But then the vacation ends. Realities intrude. Bills pile up. It's time to go back.

Everyone goes home in the end, no? Not really.

Some people just drift. From place to place. People to people. Adventure to nightmare to more adventures - it's all part of their haphazard narrative. The world is their personal Broadway stage and they are its lunatic stars.

Much is written about those lives and all they see. They sell glossy magazines and memoirs. They make the rest of us feel like shit for being so unrelentingly unremarkable.

But what about the people they leave behind? Who listens to them? Their stories?

I met Rohan* on a flight last month. He, with the easy arrogance of business class, me with the grimace of economy. I was upgraded. Sometimes, I've wished I hadn't been.

I've wished I could have just flown back home, to the comfort of everything that's familiar and in its proper place, without ever crossing paths with him. Because meetings like that change you even before you become conscious to the fact that it's happening, and by then, it's already too late...

This - him and me - wasn't part of my plan. 

He's homeless. I could call him a globe-trotter or a nomad or a wanderer or any one of those lazy self-aggrandising epithets that dull travel writers like to use to define themselves to PR execs handing out junkets; but when I look at him, that's all I see: a man without a home.

He's lived in hotels for the last eight years because he won't commit to a place or a job for more than a week at a time. He learnt how to fly, because to him that's an essential life skill.

He doesn't do Facebook or Twitter because he wants to live his life, not spend it searching for Wi-Fi. Such people exist. Who would've thought?

He came to Bombay for 4 days, he's stayed for 18. I don't want to, but I'm counting.

Each day, he asks me to go away with him, each day I say no. Every day, it becomes a little harder to refuse. I've gotten used to him.

I'm beginning to build a routine around his presence: picking a side of the bed, finding a new favourite restaurant, "our rock" at bandstand, watching him silently stare at the ceiling for a few minutes after waking up each morning, it's the few minutes of the day when I have no idea what he's thinking...

Because that's what the stories of the stayers are made up of. Memories of people. Their habits and personalities. The things they say. The things they don't say. The things they make us feel. Little details about nothing and everything that we absorb and file away. Little details that we'll remember on lonely nights and feel broken.  

Eventually, he'll be gone. A new hotel, a new city. New restaurants and new cuisines. Stronger wines and local brews. Everything will be shiny and new, the way it can only be when you're drunk on the suitcase life.

He'll ask, 10, 20, a 100 times more for me to join him before he gives up and leaves, and I'll be tempted, but I know I won't go. Because in my heart, I'm meant for a home, not a hotel.  

I like knowing where my mattresses will dent because of years of use. I like the feel of a well-loved Jaipuri razzai on Bombay's rare wintry days, and no five-star's crisp linens are ever going to be enough.

Eventually, I'll yearn for my home and my city. Bombay and I will become a blur among other, more exciting stories. He'll send me postcards from places I can't find on the map and names I can barely pronounce, but they'll dwindle and then stop.

It won't be intentional or malicious, but it will get too cumbersome. He's not used to attachments, and he won't know how to handle this one.

But I'll remember. People with roots always do. It's our curse, and our blessing.

(*name changed, obviously.)