Thirteen houses

Since childhood, I have moved through thirteen homes: two in Quetta, two in Karachi, two in Islamabad, three in the Hunza Valley, one in Portugal, one in Hungary, and two in Belgium.

I remember them less by their addresses than by what they held.

House 1 — Quetta
My first house. The house of childhood, surrounded by the mountains of Quetta. This is where home began for me, this is where I took my first steps: my parents, my siblings, the familiar rooms, and the mountains always visible somewhere beyond them. The house where I lost my mother. Thee hous that had so much grief that we had to move away.

House 2 — Quetta
Another house in the same city, but already a different life. I remember the transition more than the walls—the feeling of leaving one familiar space and learning another.

House 3 — Karachi
The first house away from the mountains. Karachi felt enormous, noisy and unfamiliar. I remember the heat, the streets, the sea, and the strange feeling of being surrounded by a city that did not know me.

House 4 — Karachi
Another temporary home in the city. By then, I had learned that belonging could move with me. A house could become familiar simply because the people I loved were inside it.

House 5 — Islamabad
A quieter house, surrounded by trees and a different landscape. Islamabad gave me another relationship with space—the city opening into hills, roads and long walks.

House 6 — Islamabad
Another version of the city, another room, another period of my life. By now, moving had become almost ordinary, but each departure still left something behind. The house where I lost my father.

House 7 — Hunza
A house in the mountains. Here, the landscape entered the house itself—the cold, the stone, the silence, the enormous mountains outside. Walking became inseparable from where I lived.

House 8 — Hunza
Another mountain home, another valley, another temporary sense of permanence. I began to understand that a landscape can become part of your memory of a house.

House 9 — Hunza
The third house in Hunza. Three homes in the same mountains, yet each one carrying a different version of me. Perhaps this is when I began to understand that I could belong to a place without staying there.

House 10 — Portugal
A house far from Pakistan. A different language, different light, different landscape. For the first time, distance itself became part of what home meant.

House 11 — Hungary
Another temporary home in Europe. Another set of rooms to learn, another place to leave. I began carrying home more consciously inside me because the geography around me was changing.

House 12 — Belgium
My first Belgian home. Brussels slowly became familiar—the streets, the sounds, the everyday rituals. Yet somewhere inside me, the mountains of Quetta remained.

House 13 — Brussels
My current house. My thirteenth home, in a city that is now part of my life but not the end of the journey.

I keep wondering about the next house.

I dream of building my own house in the mountains. I imagine a fireplace, a window looking towards the snow-peaked mountains, my mother's lullaby somewhere in the walls, my father's voice, my siblings, a place where I don't have to leave.

But how many houses will I change before I reach that house?

And when I finally build it, will I feel at home?

Will I ever be able to build it?

Perhaps these thirteen houses are not only places I have lived. They are pieces of a house I am still trying to construct, a house made from memory, movement, loss and everything I have carried with me.

Maybe home is not the house we finally arrive at, but the house we spend our whole lives trying to build.

Will I know that I am home?