The perfect closure

Old roads. Strewn with gulmohar petals, dusted with a fading nostalgia. The play of sun and shade dancing on their parched faces. A stray bicycle leaning picturesquely on a tree. Trees and trees all around. Tall, stout, leaved to their very best of summer glory. Somewhere a peacock calls lazily. Not many anymore as in those days. The familiar taste of the paratha and potato curry in the Students' Canteen. And the more than familiar, bureaucratic superiority of the administrative staff. Revisiting the old spaces. The verdant nooks that helped many to escape the world. Be it badly turned assignments or matters of heart. Driving to the signboard 'School of Humanities' and taking a sharp U-turn. What if no one recognizes me? It has been a good seven years after all.

It feels like the perfect end to my love-hate relationship with this city. My second home and my first exposure to life outside my culture, this is a city that I had once loved to the brink of my heart never knowing that one day I'll be more than desperate to escape it. And I've realized, one necessarily doesn't bid farewell to the campus after passing out of the university. Or when you leave the city (for the second time) for that matter. It'll always live inside you. A stroll between the rows of cork trees, my favorite space in the whole of the sprawling 2,300 acres, was enough to tell me that. And whenever I'm there I'll always remember the wide-eyed, passionate young woman who had arrived one July morning, armed with her Shakespeare and Keats and a little of something that resembled a small-town shyness that has never quite left her.

So long...

"If I were another on the road, I would have

hidden my emotions in the suitcase, so my poem
would be of water, diaphanous, white,
abstract, and lightweight ... stronger than memory,
and weaker than dewdrops, and I would have said:
My identity is this expanse!"

~ Mahmoud Darwish, If I Were Another

These lines have often come to me in different times over the years, but mostly when I'm the most unsure about things. There is a certain flimsiness about them, the kind that stirs you but still somehow keeps the cascade of emotions from tumbling out in the open. And hopefully they will pull me through the painfully long, fourteen-hour flight to Mumbai tonight as well (I'm not even counting the six-hour misery from here to Newark!). The time has come at last and being the lost soul that I am, I never understood what is the good in goodbyes. Nevertheless, I'll have a go at it, however feeble and halfhearted it sounds.

I will miss Seattle, a city that I've been madly in love with from then to now and forever will, despite its notorious reputation of the nine-months-a-year rains. What I have for this place is a very first love sort of fixation, for this is where I had first come, after crossing the proverbial seven seas. This is where I had first felt that acute, empty moment of being a foreigner once and quite ironically three years later, this is where I felt the most at home. There'll always, always be bits and pieces of our life spent here that I'll be rambling on about now and then, no matter how repetitive and annoying it gets.

I will also miss being a regular here for sometime, the blog-land camaraderie in particular. Howsoever virtual it is, my fellow bloggers have been a very integral part of my life for the last couple of years. Here I've found joy, compassion and comfort from sharing and being shared, and I wouldn't let anything in the world change this. Not even change, the big old bully.
So this is not really a goodbye, for as soon as I find myself rested and revived on the other side of the globe, I shall definitely try to sneak in a post or two about our 'Incredible India' or whatever it is the cliches say.

So long then!


P.S. As a befitting resolution to my Seattle diaries, the azaleas did bloom and how! They now flourish in the foster care of a very good, equally plant-loving friend.

Change

"All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another."

~ Anatole France

I wish I could frame and structure my emotions better than what the great poet has already said, and how beautifully. Achingly beautiful, actually. How very ironic it all seems - when the whole world around me is undergoing a spring makeover and getting dressed in the splendor of a newly sprouted green, inside, I am groping for ways to embrace this whole other kind of change.

Change, however insignificant or huge, has never been my forte. An annoyingly stubborn creature of habit, I can crack and burst under the slightest of pressures, a trait I have continually loathed. Last week saw the beginning of the much dreaded goodbyes - bittersweet dinners and parting gifts - and as much as I would wish this all away, I know it's out there lurking around the corner.
However this time, I'm still in one piece and that is quite unusually strong for someone like me. The feeling is yet to sink in, although the countdown has certainly begun knocking at the back of my head. I don't know if this is good or bad but trudge on I must, belting my emotions for a proper unleashing, for some day quiet and befitting. Whether this is being brave or just wallowing in denial, let it just be. It's only a handful of days anyway.

The sparrows have come back in flocks and broods. The bird-feeder, never left a moment alone, swings in joy from the dance of their communal meal. Jostling for space while eyeing that next precious morsel, the patio fills in with their noisy chatter. The furry little guy has returned too from his long winter sleep, scurrying up and down the mossy branches, sometimes even hanging upside down in the most precarious of positions. Plump, promising buds on my potted azalea stir to burst open, the full-bodied May bloom of which I won't be here to see. Unfamiliar birds grace the berry tree, just like new future residents will inhabit this apartment. Chocolate-pecan scones, the last of the homemade goodies to come out of my oven here. And thus, the temperamental baker signs off. Of course, for the time being only. 

Indian summer

Come Friday and most of our cherished stuff shall be carted away by the movers for the big shipping. What's left behind will be put up on craigslist. The apartment resembles a hurricane ravaged place at the moment and despite my compulsion to fix and arrange, there's not much I can do. The time to leave draws closer and closer with each passing day and with every move bound decision we make, the knot of unease in the stomach becomes more tight. At least once a day our talks have to have some piece of the 'when in India' puzzle, however minuscule that is. A vase here, a book there. But it's there, even if in the unspoken form.

I know I have sung my relocating litany here time and again but I'm sure you all will understand.
There is a certain comfort in repetition, not that the foolhardy roundabouts make life any easier. But it certainly makes change look simpler and somewhat less threatening, which is when my mind starts to focus on the things that I should be thankful for. The unrestrained happiness of my parents of course tops the list. They have been waiting forever and now that the time has almost come, plans and proposals of visiting and getting us settled have started dominating our phone and Skype talks.

Also, it will be the start of summer then - the legendary Indian summer. And this time I am not talking about the idyllic, late autumn scenes that the Western world tags the season with. Back home in the tropics we take it literally, word by word, where the Sun god and the electricity have a mind of their own. But as much as we curse the merciless sun and the haphazard power cuts, there are many seasonal beauties that our summer brings with it. So whenever I think of the big move, along with the assuring smile of my parents, there will be many more joys that we'll be looking forward to.

The ubiquitous presence of the golden shower (photo) that literally showers the streets with its lush yellow. The mango madness that soon hogs the limelight at every meal. The salted fruit pieces dried on the terrace before the elaborate process of pickling starts. The sweet, refreshing scent of the moist vetiver curtains filling the dark bedrooms in the sultry afternoons. The colourful sherbets to beat the pinching, hot wind. The nocturnal jasmine, aka 'queen of the night', stirring one and all with its intoxicating scent. The much awaited swing festival in June, the high note that marks the end of summer and paves the way for the monsoons.  

Not yet, not yet...

"Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colours. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving."

~ Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky

I have called it home. In my heart. I let the sun go in and sometimes watered it too. Soon the warmth spread to the very core of my being. Sip by sip I drew from it, living and loving. Days passed, seasons went by and we hopped from place to place making and leaving many a friend in the way. And now it is time for the trailing spouse to trail back. To uproot my foreigner being and plant it back where it belongs to. The air and soil miles away from here, its real home.

With the first of our things gone on craigslist today, I feel a little shaken. A lot actually, to be honest. Suddenly there is a sense of inexplicable emptiness, even if it was only a music system that we hardly used. How could I help but not get attached? Five years is a long period of time. And I was never, ever good at the art of detachment.
As much thrilled as I am to return to everything my own, I just can't shrug off this strange sadness. So many 'what ifs' loom large as I make up my mind and heart. The most baffling of them is perhaps the fear of failing to fall back in the old and familiar ruts. Ironic, isn't it?! May be because this chunk of life we have lived here will end here. It won't come back again, even if we do. Because by then a lot must have added and subtracted. Because by then it would be a different wheel of life altogether.

But there is still time, or so I would like to think. The leaves are yet to fall and the wretched trees have yet to brave their cold bareness once again. Let spring knock on my door with pearly blossoms galore.
Till then, this maddening greenness is mine.