March musings

"A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image."

~ John Didion

March.
When the other side of the globe looks forward to signs of change, to pearly sprouts of spring hopes, this side has begun anticipating the reign of a brutal sun and the imminent decay of anything and everything. Life and Death, spinning the wheels of the world.

A few days back, an Instagram friend asked me to which place did I belong and if I still lived in the US since my posts are pretty random without any chronological coherence, and the quirky hashtags #upperleftusa and #northwestisbest are used a lot to caption them. My answer was: "I live in Hyderabad now, my second time in the city followed by an earlier four-years' stint as a student though I belong to the coastal state of Odisha... and yes, we were in the States for almost five years". To this the friend replied: "You belong to so many places!", and that got me thinking.
I do after all, don't I? I even belong to places where I have lived only for a week, places that I've just been to as a tourist. Maybe belongingness comes easily to me, it's the uprootedness that I have a problem with. And in the process I have given shape to absent spaces, claimed certain parts and people of those places as mine and in turn, made them a part of my little world. How effortlessly I belong to each one of them, ever so easily like wearing a new skin, partaking in their joys and miseries equally. And therefore, I cannot help but mull over these geographies from time to time, be it the fate of the people or simply the changing seasons.

These days I go back to Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul: Memories and the City a lot, a book that I started reading some six months back and have been deliberately procrastinating to reach its end. It's so sensually rich in nostalgia and so brilliant is Pamuk's rendition of his city, that one immediately feels his aching love for the much-fabled streets of Istanbul. An acute sense of loss and melancholy hangs like a light but omnipresent fog throughout the memoir which is beautifully laced with black and white photographs of the city as Pamuk has seen and known it. One sentence that often comes back to me from the book is: "Life can't be all that bad," i'd think from time to time. 'Whatever happens, i can always take a walk along the Bosphorus."

Which is my Bosphorus then? The beach and the mango trees that I call home? Or the view of the misty Cascades that I know as home? Or the disarming smiles of the Himalayan faces amid whom I feel most at home? Or the dusty streets of an old city that I had once proudly boasted of as my second home?

   

Curfewed Night

Life has gone back to its old, mad rhythm after the twin bomb blasts took Hyderabad by a storm some ten odd days back. Many must have forgotten about it already. Such is our sense of reality and our collective consciousness. But for a day, or may be even less than that, the city had come to a standstill reeling under a red alert. On the evening of the blasts, an anxious father after watching the news, calls up and asks about our whereabouts when to my utter disbelief, I don't know a thing, blissfully engrossed in the now-real-now-surreal world of Murakami. After confirming the details, I immediately call the husband, who on his way back from work answers the phone with the same bothersome nonchalance that I had answered my father's nervous queries with. The blasts happened some thirty kilometers from where we stay, in the bustling pockets of the city, and we being on the outskirts, the so-called 'techie area', had absolutely no inkling. It felt like living on another planet.

Later in the night, amid the helter-skelter of blame games by the police and the politicians, our lack of emotional involvement bothered me. Living in the same city and being unperturbed by something as intense as this is a very uncomfortable feeling. This got me thinking about Kashmir, a land that has been throbbing inside me ever since our visit last year. A perpetually conflict-torn valley that has magically escaped the attention it deserves not only by its own country but also by the whole world. There's Iraq, there's Afghanistan but quite intriguingly, there's no Kashmir (or the Indian-controlled Kashmir, if you must). The gullible Indians, continuously force-fed by the grandeur of Hindi films and the sensationalized media, have never bothered to look beyond the veil of its enchanting beauty. And by Indians, I don't mean I am any different.

This was Kashmir for me before we found ourselves there one fine November afternoon last year. Golden valleys resplendent with almond blossoms in the spring, midnight-blue lakes carpeted with lotuses in the summer, Mughal water gardens bathed in a russet glory in the autumn, the snow-peaked Himalayas glistening in the winter sun, beautiful people beaming with the obvious pride of one's land ... This is how the Kashmir of my mind looked and this is how it had been painted for me since my childhood - through celluloid where the hero would woo his heroine in the backdrop of a sylvan landscape; through my father's tales of his visit to the valley in the late 1970s; and much later, as a constant noise blaring from the telly regarding the Kashmir conflict.

But all this changed after that vacation, and it was about time as well, after I bought a copy of Curfewed Night in my desperate quest to unearth the real Kashmir and most importantly, read something that was written by a Kashmiri. Basharat Peer, a Kashmiri journalist-cum-writer, in his simple yet compelling narration, tells many crushing tales of the terrible beauty that this once legendary paradise has morphed into. In this haunting memoir, we come across the unfortunate people who have been treated as mere pawns by both the army and the militants. Peer, through a poignant portrait of this terrible situation, takes us to these people and the devastating truth they live with everyday.

I am never too comfortable discussing politics or its related aspects. I find it too vapid and meaningless. But today I've tried to dance on its promiscuous frills. I have tried to understand the fathomless pit of misery that Kashmiris have been pushed into since the last two decades. I have tried to feel the endless threat of living under terror and uncertainty, and of being trapped in never-ending curfews. For the scores of unfortunate Pandits who flew the valley in flocks, abandoning their paradise overnight, I have tried to understand that numb feeling that settles in when you don't know where you belong to, when the word 'home' is just a large, gaping wound that will perhaps never heal. 

After receiving this much needed education, I went back to our vacation in Kashmir. I tried not to look at the photographs and my ramblings as a tourist, and all I could gather was this nugget of emotion from our daily conversations with our very amicable cottage owner in Srinagar - "How do I get the last fifteen years of my life back?"

In Ashima's shoes

"For being a foreigner Ashima is beginning to realise, is a sort of lifelong pregnancy - a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts."

~ Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

Seven winters back when I had first read The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri's heartrending tale, it had stirred and brewed a little storm inside me. Since then I have gone back to it, in chunks and bits, like a fate-worn lover who has to return to the memories, living and losing at the same time. The love affair continues, only this time I am one of them from the pages. Ashima - a demure Bengali woman born in Calcutta, brought up amidst a fierce sense of culture and draped in unpretentious tangail sarees. She marries Ashoke, an engineering student at MIT and accompanies him for a new life to America - "the land of opportunities".

Ashima's life in the States is shaped out of many realities - the regular calls to Fulton fish market in the hope of a lucky catch of rohu or ilish, the much dreaded driving lessons when she would cringe her face and push the accelerator uneasily which would result in a beeline of traffic honking impatiently behind her, the mounting vexation during the customer care calls when she has to spell every single alphabet of 'Ganguli' unfailingly and with examples. Prior to my life as a foreigner, this futile yet continuous search of one's identity and the reluctant unraveling of oneself to blend in, both physically and mentally, had not been this huge a part of me. Now I, too, am ashima - one who does not have boundaries - for one simply cannot afford any in the desperate confusion of the old and the new.

My solidarity with Ashima transgresses the boundaries of age and experience. A surge of tender pity grips me when anxious and alone in the final trimester of pregnancy she craves for jhaal muri (an East Indian snack of puffed rice and spices) and quite helplessly tosses chopped onions into a bowl of Rice Krispies and Planters peanuts. There was not much choice for an Indian's culinary comforts in the America of the 70s. Ashima's most intimidating task, more so because she wears her Indianness with aplomb, is to understand and accept the American ways of her children who are themselves trapped in a huge chasm of cultural mores. How much could one fight one's way out of the linguistic and cultural barriers back then?

Even after a good thirty years nothing much has changed. Foodwise, yes, a lot has. With the mushrooming of Indian grocery stores and restaurants in almost every corner of the States, pleasing one's taste buds isn't a questionable dream anymore. Also, what was once the struggle for existence has undergone a vast change over the last twenty years resulting in an unbecoming vanity fair. But the old haunting feeling of rootlessness sits still in the same dusty corner of the heart. Festivals come and go, seasons spring and fall, but the ache remains. I have been walking in Ashima's shoes for the past three years, across six states and on a multitude of roads. With each step the bite has become worse, fanning the sore of longing till the wound feels like a second skin. And thus another day breaks, impregnated with a perpetual unknown wait...

The spice jar

"Take this with you, but careful -
Don't lose it in the vastness of the Atlantic."
She meant her words, my mother,
a simple woman with little desires.
True, losing 'things' across infinite miles is easy.
I have learnt it well, bit by bit.
A dear dear uncle, a cousin...
Ma told me how the sad, hungry ocean swallowed them all.
And I just stared, defeated and distanced.

The glass walls of the small jar looked familiar,
choked with cloves, cardamoms, cinnamon sticks, pepper pods.
A very Indian smell, guardians of my world.
I've emptied it into my days and nights,
into my morning tea, flavouring the curries,
always searching for that familiar aroma.
The aroma of Ma's palms,
of ginger garlic, of love and sacrifice.

Everyday I see it, the half filled, half emptied jar,
sitting mute in the disturbingly neat white kitchen cupboard.
Perfunctorily, I refilled the jar today
with imported spices from the India bazaar.
Spices that have traveled across the proverbial seven seas
shedding some skin of originality on their way.
And so I mixed them all, the Was and the Is,
letting my world unhinge into an unknown territory.
But deep inside my labyrinthine thoughts
I am scared, as if I have lost my only defense.

For the Was and the Is never meet.

I am all that I have

Gigantic spruce and pines engirdle my vision

watchful, stern as armed guards.
Rhododendrons of a bloody hue
proud of their plump bloom,
flank a choking-green yard.
Shivering thistle leaves promise a good summer.
Only what kind of summer, I ponder...
Unknown birds sing unheard tunes as if,
their lyrics were potent enough
to germinate a belongingness!

Strange, a nature so unscathed and unmarred,
everyday bruises my identity!
These hardly seem mine...
the trees, the flowers, the birds.
All beautiful, in such proximity
and yet so much distanced!
They can charm and excite,
and yet fail to captivate the 'me'...

A foreign me
that searches for trails of known-ness.
For sunny, tropical faces
For spices wafting in the air
For the known cacophony of crows, of blaring honks.
This frozen, alien nature,
this unaccustomed earth...
This is not mine.
Only, I am all that I have.

P.S. This was written with certain pre-conceived, foolish notions of a hopeless romantic about her initial experiences of being the 'foreigner'. Even the sylvan abundance of Seattle had failed to soothe her homesickness back then!