Until I Find Home

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, surrounded by the mountains of Quetta. This is where home began for me, and where I took my first steps. My parents, my siblings, the familiar rooms, and the mountains always visible somewhere beyond them. It is also the house where I lost my mother and a childhood.

House 2 — Quetta
Another house in the same city, but already a different life. I remember the transition more than the walls: leaving one familiar space and learning another. This is where the feeling of home was lost, and where my constant struggle to find it began.

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. I felt disoriented.

House 4 — Karachi
Another temporary home in the same 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. This one was in a tall building, where the lift or the stairs were the only way to move around. It was the first time I understood vertical living.

House 5 — Islamabad
A quieter house, surrounded by trees and a different landscape. Islamabad gave me another relationship with space: a 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. This is 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. This is where I started to feel at home again. I was back among the mountains, back where I belonged.

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. This house also became a memory of my father. He lived far from me, and it was here that I lost him, so the place became another place to grieve.

House 9 — Hunza
The third house in Hunza. Three homes in the same mountains, yet each carried a different version of me. Perhaps this is when I began to understand that I could belong to a place without staying there. This house was big, but I still felt out of place, and I still don’t know why.

House 10 — Portugal
A house far from Pakistan. A different language, different light, a different landscape. This is when I got into a master’s program in documentary filmmaking and moved for my first semester. For the first time, distance itself became part of what home meant.

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

House 12 — Belgium
My first Belgian home, where I moved for my third semester. It was my brother’s house, a nice flat in a forest commune. Brussels slowly became familiar: the streets, the sounds, the everyday rituals. He made me feel like I was back in my first house. He was family, and that was all I had been searching for. Yet somewhere inside me, the mountains of Quetta remained.

House 13 — Brussels
My current house, and my thirteenth home, in a city that is now part of my life but not the end of the journey. It has a garden, and my window opens onto it. I moved here because I couldn’t stay with my brother. The law in Belgium doesn’t allow it, and everyone needs their own space and has to live separately. In this house I lost two brothers back in Pakistan, and grief became heavy. In this house I started climbing. In this house I started cycling. For now, it feels more like a home than any other house, but I don’t know until when. I keep wondering about the next house.

I dream of building my own house in the mountains. I imagine a fireplace, a window looking toward the snow-peaked mountains, 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.