There is a specific kind of stillness that only exists after midnight. Maybe not in the center of the city, but surely here, where my apartment sits. People always tell me I should sleep earlier, but I could never bring myself to sacrifice the solitude that a quiet, dark night gives me. I loved it too much.

A few nights ago, I was looking for that same quiet. I wanted so badly to think of nothing, but my brain wouldn't listen. To drown out the noise of my own thoughts, I opened Instagram and started scrolling. Just mindless movement. And then, I stopped on a reel. Days have passed, the world kept moving, and so did I. I went to the office the next morning, heavy-eyed and hollowed out by sleep deprivation, going through the motions of a life that felt suddenly superficial. My mind was still trapped in the screen. I couldn't escape the devastating sorrow in that old man's eyes when his grandchild asked him:

"Diljeet k Daady to Sargodha jana tha, aur mery daady ko kahan jana?" (Diljeet's grandfather had to go to Sargodha, but where did my grandfather have to go?)

And the old man, carrying seventy eight years of exile in his throat, said: "Warwal, District Jhelum, Tehsil Chakwal….." That was the address of his home before Partition. And now, here I am again, buried in the quiet of another midnight. I am trying so hard to think of nothing, to let the sleep take me, but this thought refuses to leave. It sits heavily on my chest. Can a place be stolen? Can a border rewrite your entire existence? If yes then where does the soul go? Is Warwal where his home was, or is it where his home is? 

And it makes me wonder... What exactly is a home?
Where is my home?
Is it this apartment, with its four walls that refuse to let me sleep? Or is it just a place with my things?
Is it the house I grew up in, the one I still travel back to once a month, living out of a weekend bag like a guest in my own childhood? Have I been displaced from my own life, wandering through a world where I don't truly have a home at all?

The old man must have been triggered by the movie “Main Wapas Aounga” (I will come back). It is a beautiful line for a film, because cinema never has to answer what happens after the credits roll. But I have been unable to leave that question alone. Back to where? He has a map carved into his heart. He can recite the entire address by heart even after seventy-eight years, from the village to the Tehsil to the district of a home that no longer is his. Or maybe it is. I don’t know. But that place that “was” or “is” his home now sits inside a country that no longer claims him. A home that the world didn't even bother to keep the same, because Jhelum isn't even the district of his village anymore. Bureaucrats drew new lines, time passed, and the map changed, but not the one that is engraved on his heart. Time moved on but he somehow stayed behind. In the end, that precise address does nothing for him. It gets him nowhere. It cannot buy him a ticket back; it cannot tear down the border. It just stands there as proof that a place once existed, and that he was once real in that place. That is all it is for him now. And somehow, that is not nothing.

I think about this because, as I said, I keep asking myself: Where is my home?
I carry a smaller, almost embarrassing version of the same ache. I call it embarrassing because mine did not cost what he cost. I didn't have to cross any borders that would later become impossible to cross back. No new lines were drawn on a map because I left. No one had to. I just drove two hours down the GT Road, from a village right there in Chakwal, not too far from that very same "Warwal" where his home “was”, or “is”, to a job in Islamabad. It’s the way half the boys my age do. They leave for Lahore, for Karachi, or even Dubai, if they are luckier. Or unluckier, depending on how you count it. And yet, I go home once a month now, and every single time, somewhere in the middle of that visit, I feel a specific, quiet, disorienting thing. I never had the language for it. Not until I watched an old man from my own soil answer a boy's half-joking question with an address that no longer belongs to him.

I am a literal guest in my own house. The room I grew up in, the room that built me, the room I can still draw with my eyes shut, has been turned into a storeroom. It happened gradually. A few boxes in the beginning that needed to sit somewhere, then more boxes, and by the time I noticed it had fully happened, it had already fully happened. Nobody sat me down to ask me. There was no need to.
They did the reasonable thing, the exact same way I did the reasonable thing by moving out for a job. It was simply the best use of that space. You cannot ask a family to maintain a shrine just because a child used to sleep there, or because that child used to think those four walls were his entire world.
So when I go home now, I sleep in the drawing room. on the sofa or on a mattress laid out for the night, the way you make up a bed for a relative who is just passing through. My mother apologizes for it every time, and I tell her it's fine. And it is fine, in the sense that I understand completely why it happened. I hold no grievance. A room cannot stay a shrine forever for someone who used to sleep there and now he isn’t there most of the time.
But there is a particular quiet violence in being asked, gently and wordlessly, to sleep in the guest space of the house that built you. I have not found a way to feel fine about that part yet, even while understanding it completely. 

Even the neighbor's dog still knows me. I stop by their gate sometimes on the walk back from the fields and he comes straight to me, tail wagging, the way he has since he was a puppy, before I left. His behavior hasn't shifted at all. He doesn't know about Islamabad, or my job, or the fact that I only show up for forty-eight hours a month. He still tackles me with the same loud, unbothered familiarity he always did. For him no time has passed.
And it makes me wonder: is human love directly proportional to distance?
When I walk through the door, my family treats me with so much more love now. They are softer, gentler, completely devoted to making me comfortable. It is beautiful of them, and I hold no grievance for it. But it makes me realize that for humans, distance changes the chemistry of how we love. We use politeness and extra affection to bridge the gap that time has made. But for an animal, love is flat. It doesn't calculate weeks or miles. The dog doesn't love me more because I was gone, and he doesn't love me less. He just remembers me exactly as I was.
There is something almost funny and entirely unbearable about a dog that isn't even mine holding onto the boy I used to be, while the people who love me most are busy welcoming the guest I have become.

And in Islamabad, where I now spend twenty-eight days out of every thirty, I am still a stranger. I’ve only been here for a year. I am twenty-four years old, which means this city accounts for barely four percent of my entire life. It’s nothing. I know the roads, but I do not know the city the way you know a place that raised you, the way I know which field floods first when the rains come, or the way I knew, without ever being told, which house on our street to avoid because the uncle there was unkind to children. That village is ninety-six percent of who I am.
Yet, Islamabad has never once asked me to know it intimately, and I have never once been offered the chance. It is not cruelty; it is just indifference. And indifference is somehow harder to be angry at, because you cannot argue with a city that owes you nothing back. But it leaves you in a strange position, trying to build a life in a place that is only four percent of your history, while the other ninety-six percent slowly turns into a storeroom. 

I used to think home was a physical fact, the house, the room, the exact tree outside my window that I could draw with my eyes shut. I go back now and the room does not even exist as a room anymore, only as a place where things get stored, and I am the one sleeping where guests sleep. I sit in what used to be mine and feel like a visitor to a museum built around a version of me that stopped existing the day I packed a bag and left. The house did not even have to break its promise. It simply needed the space, and gave it away to boxes. I understand that, and it still undoes me every single time.

So then maybe it isn't the physical structure. Maybe it's the people. But the people have gone on living whole lives without me in the room to witness them happening. My mother's afternoons now have a shape I was not there to watch form. My cousins have jokes that need explaining to me now, the way you explain a joke to an outsider, gently, patiently. That gentleness is its own quiet proof that I am no longer quite one of them the way I used to be.
I get folded into the family for a weekend, wholly, warmly, and then folded back out again on Sunday evening. Both foldings are done with love, I want to be very clear about that, with real love, but you do not fold someone in and out like that if they still fully belong. You do it to someone who is dear to you and also, somehow, no longer entirely yours.
The ultimate weight of this exile fell upon me during those days in the city. When the phone call came, I didn't rush home as a son stepped out of his room; I rushed home on "approved leave." The city granted me a brief, bureaucratic window to watch my father die. He passed away right in front of me, his final breaths marking the definitive closure of the world I belonged to. I was there, I held his hand, but the machinery of my new life was already ticking in the background, waiting to pull me back down the highway. When the anchor of a father is removed, the house ceases to be a home at all; it becomes an archive.

There is a word for this that Punjabi carries and English keeps failing to hold properly. “Pardes” (foreign land). It used to mean somewhere else entirely, some other country, a place you needed a passport to reach. Now it can mean two hours down the very same road, under the very same flag, in the very same country whose anthem you both stood for in school.
Nobody had to leave Pakistan to become what that old man was describing through his tears at midnight on my phone screen. You can become unhomed without ever once crossing anything but a district line. And somehow that makes it lonelier, not less, because at least his grief has a war to blame, a border to point at, a treaty with a date on it.
Mine has nothing to point at at all. It just has the GT Road, and a bus that runs every hour, and a home that is two hours away and fully reachable and still, somehow, harder to answer for than an address that has not existed in seventy-eight years.

I think this is the particular, unclaimed displacement of my generation here. It does not get a ministry. It does not get a rehabilitation policy or a line item in anyone's five-year plan, because on paper, nothing happened to us. We are not refugees. We are not migrants, not in the way the word usually gets used, with all its weight and its documentation and its grief that the world has agreed to recognize.
We are simply people who did the reasonable thing, who left home for work the way you're supposed to, the way every elder in our lives told us to, and discovered on the other side of that very sensible decision that home does not wait the way that boy's grandfather's address seemed to wait for him, whole and unchanged, ready to be recited the moment someone finally asked, half-joking, where his own grandfather would have to go. Home moves. Or we move, and it quietly, without cruelty, without any single moment we could point to and grieve properly, stops keeping the room the way it used to. Sometimes it stops keeping the room quite literally, and starts keeping boxes instead.

The old man has it almost easier, and I feel strange even writing that sentence, because his loss is the one that should be unbearable and mine should be nothing at all by comparison. But his home is fixed precisely because it is unreachable. Nothing can go on changing a place you are never allowed to return to. It stays exactly as it was the day he left, held perfectly still by the very impossibility of going back.
Mine is two hours away, reachable every single month, and it keeps moving without me anyway, turning my room into storage while I'm gone. It is its own particular cruelty, gentler than his, but a cruelty all the same.

For the longest time, the question for me was always about that one word: Kahan. Where? We all have to go back to our homes eventually, sure, but where exactly are our homes?
I realize now that the question is no longer about geography, or even of the people. I am hit by a quiet sort of homelessness, a realization that I am a citizen of a time that has passed, rather than a place that exists. I am a citizen of a time when I had a room, and a father, and a family that didn’t use to handle me with such careful politeness, a time when they didn't bring out the new cutlery for me just because I walked through the door.
I have a house now, and I have an address I can recite from memory. But I no longer possess a coordinate on this earth that knows me back.
So how do I go back to my country? How do I return to a time that has already passed? How do I go home, when my home, too, has become just as unreachable as Warwal is to that old man?