Some cities take something from you, and then some cities quietly give you back pieces of yourself you didn’t know were missing. For me, Mumbai was never about its fast trains or flashy dreams. It was about a single room with chipped walls and dusty windows, where I learned how to be alone without being lonely.
Where I learned how to exist without explaining. Before I found that space, I didn’t realise how much of myself I had been holding back just to fit in, just to be easy to love, easy to live with. This isn’t a story about a city, really. It’s about what it means to find a home of one’s own and what it costs when you have to leave it behind.
So, let’s start.
Being a student of social work, with a specialization in Women-Centred Practice, I’ve always questioned the things around me. The norms, the roles, the silences. It was never a loud question. Instead, I always asked questions to myself and tried to shake off my old beliefs. It was like a constant negotiation with myself, my own upbringing, and my own boundaries.
Coming from a lower-middle-class family, we never had a house of our own. We always lived in rented apartments. That meant four of us: my parents, my brother, and I shared two small rooms, or sometimes just one. It never felt like a problem. It was just how life was.
Until I came to Mumbai.
Even now, I don’t resent the life we lived. I appreciate everything we managed with what we had. But for the first time, after living in my hostel room in Mumbai, I began to feel caged within those same four walls I once accepted so easily. The real shift happened when I had to return home after completing my post-graduate degree. It wasn’t a problem exactly, but something inside me felt different. Off. As if I was being asked to leave behind not just a city but a version of myself I had just begun to understand.
I loved my home. I loved the time I spent with my family. I cherish it deeply. But in those last few days in Mumbai, I didn’t feel like going back. Something felt wrong. I couldn’t name it at first, but it sat inside my chest like a warning: you’re going to change again, and not in the way you want to. You’ll slip back into being the older version of yourself, the one who didn’t ask for space, who didn’t claim freedom, who accepted things as they were.
When I finally said this out loud to my best friend, she said something I didn’t expect. “You’re not afraid of going home,” she told me. “You’re afraid of losing the freedom you’ve found here in Mumbai.”
But I protested. “I don’t even go out that much in Mumbai. I mostly stay in my room. It’s not like I’m living this wild, free life here either.”
To this, she simply said, “Maybe you don’t see it yet, but this place gave you the kind of home you’ve always wanted. A place where you feel safe enough to be fully yourself.”
Her words stayed with me for hours. That night, lying in bed, I couldn’t sleep. I kept replaying what she said. And slowly, I understood.
Yes, this small hostel space, this noisy, chaotic, overwhelming city, Mumbai, gave me something precious. Even though I didn’t explore the city much, this room gave me a kind of freedom I had never known before. Here, I could cry without worrying that my parents would see and start worrying about me. Here, I could talk openly with friends about political opinions and fears I never dared to share back home. Here, I could spend an entire day in bed, not because I was lazy, but because I needed to rest, and no one questioned it.
Here, I could be weak. I didn’t have to keep pretending to be strong all the time. I didn’t have to smile just to make others comfortable. I could let go.
I began to see that what I was doing back home wasn’t just about being a “good daughter” or a “well-behaved girl.” It was a performance. The kind of performance feminist thinker Judith Butler speaks of when she talks about gender not as something we are, but something we do, repeatedly, in response to societal expectations. In Butler’s words, gender is a performative construct. It is constructed through repeated acts. And I had been performing femininity for so long that I barely noticed the weight of it. Being soft-spoken, agreeable, never angry, always smiling, even when I was tired of smiling. These weren’t just habits. They were roles. Roles I had never auditioned for but had been cast in since childhood.
Mumbai, and this hostel room in particular, gave me the stage to step off. To unlearn the script. To improvise. To simply be.
And in doing so, I wasn’t just discovering a new home. I was doing what Adrienne Rich once urged us to do in her landmark address, ‘Claiming an Education.’ She talks about the difference between receiving an education, which means passively taking what is given, and claiming one. Claiming means asserting your presence. Demanding the right to think, speak, and exist fully.
That’s what this space allowed me to do.
By saying all this, I don’t mean to say that my real home, where my parents live, is something I hate. I love them. I know they’ve done their best. But this hostel room in Mumbai, this space which I carved out for myself, gave me something else. It gave me the home I always longed for. A place where I didn’t have to wear the armour of being the “easy” child. A home of my own. A space where I could be messy, angry, sad, and opinionated. Where I could be beyond the barriers of gender and expectation, which so often suffocate me under the weight of being the “honour” of the family.
A space where I didn’t always have to be soft-spoken and respectful to people I didn’t even like as human beings. A space where I could finally stop performing.
A home of my own.
Where I could just be.
Just exist.