Dear Home – Experience by Akshay K
Leave the Light On – Stories About Home Exhibition in the BECROFT GALLERY
As I entered the gallery and before I even read the wall text properly, it felt right somehow, like walking into someone’s home through the backdoor instead of ringing the bell.
A voice starts talking about Mom and Dad. Then another, about a door that was always left unlocked for someone. A change they went through , and youngerself they look back.
I don’t know these people. I have never met them. But I recognise the shape of what they are describing before I recognise details , the specific ache of trying to explain feeling using a floor plan or a story.
Illustrations shift so slowly I keep losing the track of when they have changed. A window, open and then not, I find myself watching them the way you watch a tea kettle, half aware , half somewhere else entirely, back in a house I have not lived in for years, the one I didn’t know I was still homesick for until just now.
Music does not announce itself . It just sits underneath everything, the way a good sound track does when you are not meant to notice it is working on you.
The corner of the exhibition where audio fades, a stack of blank cards and pens are inviting to write your own letter, a “Dear Home” letter and whatever that means to you.
By the time I reach “Dear Home” to write my own letter, I don’t move for a minute. I just stand there, still inside someone else’s memory. Trying to figure out where mine begin.
As I stroll around in my thoughts’ I see the wall beside it was full of “Dear Homes”. I stood there longer than I meant to, just reading.
A few kept coming back to the same starting point ,an empty room before it was anything else. Bare floors, no curtains yet, the particular echo of a space that hasn’t decided what it is. One card traced that whole arc in a few lines: the emptiness, then slowly, deliberately, the decorating a shelf here, a color chosen, a chair finally in the right corner. Home, it seems, isn’t a moment. It’s a long, quiet argument you have with a space until it agrees to hold you.
Others wrote like they were catching up with someone they’d neglected. Sorry for being away so long. Not dramatic, just honest, the guilt of leaving a place to sit empty while life happened elsewhere. And right alongside it, almost always, a promise: I’ll be near now. Not perfect, just present. It’s striking how many people write to their homes the way they’d write to a person they’d let down.
And then the gratitude , warmth, shelter, the faults accepted without being asked to explain them. A few cards thanked home for taking them in exactly as they were, mess and all, no performance required. That seemed to be the quiet center of a lot of these letters: home as the one place that didn’t need you to be finished yet.
What struck me most, reading card after card, was how different the memories were and how identical the shape of the feeling stayed. A childhood kitchen. A first flat with nothing in it. A house inherited, argued over, loved anyway.
Different rooms, different griefs, different reasons for staying away too long , but the same need underneath all of it, written over and over in different handwriting: let me come back. let me be forgiven. let me belong here again.
At last when I think about my home all I think of is smell like soil after first rains, that specific ancient smell of earth, tastes like warm honey, the slow and unhurried sweetness and like a season’s first mango, messy golden pulp impossible to eat without it running down the hand a little. And in my thoughts I come back to the same place like a butterfly hovering and looking, unsure for a moment even when I already know where to land. And then I do land and I always land.
That’s the thing this exhibition gets right, I think. It doesn’t tell you what home means. It just gives you a pen, and many strangers’ worth of proof that whatever it means to you, you’re not the only one still writing about it.
AKSHAY KALE