I am a pronoyee . Just a very ordinary girl. A quiet girl raised in a middle class family. I've always been overly sentimental, whether it's toward people or even objects.
As a child, a box of sweets brought home the empty box would become a toy box for me. I’d build dollhouses out of it. Gradually, the paper box would get old and torn. My mother would scold me, asking for the box back, but I couldn't throw it away, drawn to it by an intense emotional attachment. Even though new boxes would often arrive at home, I couldn't let go of the old, half-torn one.
As I grew older, I realized that even small, seemingly insignificant things could become dear to me in just a short time. Relatives often told me to be less attached because if a girl gets too attached, it becomes hard to fit everything into a suitcase after marriage. I used to think , how would I even pack my favorite balcony, the sunlight peeking through it, the cozy bed, the familiar room? I still don't have the answer. And maybe that’s why packing a suitcase before moving into someone else’s house through marriage feels like the hardest thing to do.
From broken bangles, dried-out bindis, snapped hair clips, to even the ceiling of the room, girls hold a strange attachment to everything. Men have less of this kind of sentimentality, by that, I mean they feel less emotional attachment to things. They can neatly fold their clothes into a suitcase and look for a new home elsewhere. But once a woman becomes emotionally attached, she can't move on easily. Yet, by nature's rule, it's the woman who has to leave her home, her family, her comfort. That’s why, for a woman, the concept of "her own home" is so hard to define.
When I visit my father's house, I worry, did I shut the window in my in-laws’ home, did I tidy up the dressing table drawer, has everyone eaten there? And when I leave my father's house to return to my in-laws’ home, I feel like I didn’t open the toy box from childhood, didn’t recall all the memories, didn’t watch the play of sunlight from my favorite balcony, didn’t say goodbye to my favorite things. And in those moments, I wonder, do I even truly own anything? Even my home is now divided, half belongs to my in-laws’ home, half to my father's. Going back and forth between the two, I realize there's no place I can really call mine.
Yet how deeply attached I am to both these homes.And perhaps that’s the essence of being a woman, learning to belong deeply, even in places that are never truly mine....never a home which can be known as pronoyee's house .