It was an afternoon call. Father had called to announce his decision not to include me as a member of his family in the ongoing Census 2026. I could not grasp his meaning. His response to my query took me aback. He blatantly told me that he wanted to exclude me from his family in the Census. The words “his family” started vibrating in my ears. After my divorce in 2019, I had changed my address for all practical and official purposes to my parents’ residence.Now when he told me to separate from “his family”, I was made to feel like a person with no home, no family, no roots – nothing. It’s not like I have never been made to feel this way before. But the ruthless declaration of reality struck me hard and revealed the frailty of my position.The Census form has so many columns regarding one’s “house”. The online self-enumeration form starts with the “Family” column, followed by numerous questions about the structure of the house one lives in. But reading the form, which asks for name of the head of the family, made me wonder: Why should just one person be the “head” of the family? In a patriarchal society, obviously, an older male would become the default choice in every family. This idea of a head for a family is the very opposite of the fundamental idea of democracy and equality.Even in the column for declaring the sex of family members, there are only three options – male, female or transgender. This column leaves behind the entire spectrum of the LGBTQ+ community.To return to home – it is always a fleeting concept for a woman. Very few women in India have their own homes. We women begin our journey from our “father’s home”, then shift or rather we are shifted in most of the cases to our husband’s home, and we end our mortal journey in our son’s home.Are any of these homes really “home” for women? The answer is a big No. Home, for women, is not always a cosy, warm shelter of love and affection. More often, it is a cold chamber where we barter our fears and worries and agree to our subjugation in exchange for some kind of assurance of food and shelter. We cannot shout out loud, we cannot cry, we cannot make love as we want to. For me, home is an endless search for a place of security that I never found in my life.I must acknowledge I have never found home in the structure called a house.If any woman takes a path different from the rule of linearity set by society for women – from father’s house to husband’s house to son’s house – she falls into the pit of nowhereness. She is nowhere in the imagination of her family, state or country. So this census also leaves me nowhere. I have no place to add my family. Don’t we then need to redefine the idea of family? Who is our family?Also read: The Virtuous VictimI was only two years old when my parents left me with my maternal aunt. It was never a decision recorded on paper. It was an unwritten arrangement. I remained suspended between two families, my parents’ family and my aunt’s. An unadopted child living on charity. To escape from this limbo, I chose a man. But choice exists without existing for women, so my choice was called an “elopement” and my marriage “unscriptural”.The 21-year-old woman I was did not know that making a “choice” would make her life more difficult. After almost a decade of domestic violence, my husband left me for another woman when I was nine months pregnant and twenty days away from my date of delivery. When I returned as a divorcee from that marriage, I brought with me “distrust” and shame for both my families, both of which had always been a semblance of family, rather than family in essence, to me.They wanted me to be grateful to them but by then I had grown a tongue and held a pen. I had started writing – something my family considers a forbidden act. They wanted me to be the epitome of a sacrificial mother who never claimed space, let alone property. Any act by which I claim space is, for them, an act of transgression.My parents disowned me for a long time. And my aunt and uncle’s family took pleasure in their philanthropy by making me understand that “I am a sheltered one”, “a charity case.” So they denied me every opportunity to claim space too.Also read: Are We Asking the Wrong Questions About Women’s Work and Falling Fertility?Seen against a wider perspective, this is not an aberration. The denial to accept me as a family member in Census 2026 comes from the patriarchal-feudal belief that women like me need to be invisiblised when it comes to property. They are afraid that if they include me in the family in the Census, I might secure another proof in support of my property rights. This is despite the fact that I support both the families through my labour.In India, work or labour does not define rights. (Data also backs the claim.) Although Indian women make up over 42% of India’s agricultural workforce and perform up to 73% of rural farming tasks, they own only about 12.8% of operational landholdings. This gap between intensive labour and property rights keeps millions of female workers officially unrecognised as farmers and thus denied many government rights and benefits.My parents’ denial of my recognition as a family member is a result of their deep-seated patriarchy, which never recognises the woman as an owner. Census 2026 could have made it mandatory for parents to recognise their divorced, separated daughters as family members. But the Indian state, having fallen deep into the pit of Brahmanical Hindutva-led patriarchy, is never willing to give women space.So I don’t have a column to fill in the Census. The first phase of the Census is about household enumeration. I don’t own a house and the house I live in denies my existence. So where is my place in this Census, dear India? You have always failed your daughters, and you are failing them again.In this way, neither India nor my family are my home. For a country or a house to be ‘home’, it needs to provide warmth, security and empathy. But Indian families and the Indian state are indifferent to the existence of women like us who break the rules, who challenge the status quo. We are sluts to families, witches to society and non-existent to the country.Moumita Alam is a poet from West Bengal. She has two published collections of poetry. Her work has been translated in Telugu and Tamil.