Living in the Land of In-Betweens

Today marks a year of being away from my family in India, having embarked on a fiercely turbulent and beautiful period in my life: full of learning, leaving and living. It's been a year since I moved to this country to pursue my higher education. I can safely say I've grown and learnt more outside school than within classrooms as a student or teaching one as an instructor.

Leaving the streets I grew up in full of mongrels that know me, extended family living a stone's throw away, best friends on the next street, wrestling with brothers, standing about predominantly male occupied spaces like that roadside tea shop where the Tea Master knows exactly how you take your tea but never feeling threatened by any of them, and never feeling lost: this has been a crazy ride albeit momentous. Cultural shocks were always in the little things for me: neighbours whose living room I've never seen, the people who walked away after 'How you doing?' as I was knee deep in replies and, the absence of street dogs and terraces. Not knowing anything was one of the best things that happened to me and I thoroughly enjoy cracking jokes inside my own head, the intricacies of my language playing in my head, and meeting new people.

Is it all sunshine? No. Living with my parents all this time was a choice I didn't question or think twice about. It was a natural state of affairs. Living like that, I never questioned what home meant. If someone from my own city asked me where my home was, I would give them the name of my neighbourhood. If I was in a different state in my country, I would say 'Tamilnadu'. There are so many layers and social constructs to this sense of home that I never introspected upon. All these variations of answers thus far to 'where is your home' were never unsettling and never did not feel right. They were all culturally and socially understood. Now, in the midst of these versions, I have zoomed out into thinking about those terms across mere geographical entities and into a question of who I am and into a deeper sense of what the term could come to mean.

There are things I miss about India in this country and that is easily a cultural condition. The sense of a community here is constrained in my world simply because I have only been exposed to one version of what community means. I wonder now, if I miss knowing people on the road I happen to walk on. One of my best friends was forever skeptical to go on walks with me because I usually am familiar with the people on the streets (and their dogs) and I kept stopping to say hi to all of them, and that irritated her to no end. There should have been some sort of familiarity here by this point, I reckon but I am not sure if I have located any. On the other hand, I enjoy slinking away into the background and not being known or recognised. I live in-between ends like these two, swinging between sides and not feeling comfortable staying on either end. There are aspects of living in India that I adore, enmeshed parts of my life here that I am grateful for and enjoy; but neither of them fit anymore. Rather, I don't fit into either of these societies completely. I can't stay in one because I have been in the other, they're different moulds. This has led to living in a land of living in-between worlds. I could call it that or a feeling of not belonging in either of these places. All that said and done, this is not necessarily a bad condition either.

None of this is associated with sadness in its entirety. These are phases of growing and coming to terms with certain aspects of life that was buried underneath layers of a false sense of security at various points. Right now, to truly be in turbulence is interesting as it helps me let go of weights that make me feel put otherwise. I can now cast some over my shoulders and move a step on (just threw out some toxic atmosphere I had to live with for the last year, there is that progress). I have a wonderful local poetry community to be a part of since the start of my Spring and numerous acquaintances from there to be thankful for. My vulnerability has always been a calculated venture, a fort from my own past but aspects of it see tiny differences. My summer months have turned around to have me encounter some really interesting experiences. I learnt to be vulnerable on a slack-line with a great person, garnered some wonderful friendships (well, three to be precise) that has its own period of waxing and waning, forever plummeting and flying. These relatively newfound but truly close and important relationships have their own roadblocks that I am trying to break through in ways I best know how to. I wonder how they are going to turn out, but here is to hoping only for the best.

The land of in-between is every man's subjective land, I assume. We all battle with our own sources of discomfort, freedom and independence. I recently had a conversation with one of my childhood friends who is also abroad and she admitted to feeling the same way, though her version varied a little from how I feel at this juncture. We are all lost here. We are all trying to grapple away at the fray ends of the first thing that feels like home, like familiarity and relationships that remind us of our loved ones back home before it manifests into itself. These new experiences shape me as I encounter them and I'm learning of the many ways in which someone loves and prioritizes another.

It's been a year since I arrived at Columbus. I'm not precisely sure of what I learnt in the last year but that every moment has been a form of growth even if it comes with sadness or pain, every relationship a lesson, and also that I am three truly honest and genuine friends richer with whom I can talk about anything.

Also, home is no longer a place.

Home after all this, is a feeling. Whether I shall find it and acknowledge it the way I envisage it, however, is not something I know of. I can't control that.

Until then, from the land of in-betweens,

Hemu

Penury

It has become necessary for you to climb the corporate ladder

and quit in time when there’s a safe stack of money ready to hold you if you fall;

when you begin to chase long lived dreams of staring at the stars in multiple countries

from under canvas tents, atop motorbikes and by campfires.

Should I throw away what I shouldn't have had in the first place

with the only means to chase my dreams being the ideal fall

of chasing sunsets and sunrises, meeting new people

and dining on different tables, settings with wine, tea and cheese?

Would the world say I followed my dream by deciding to throw away a luxurious life

that I never wanted

or that I settled for the penury that I deserve? 

Image copyrights in the picture itself. 

~Hemu

Dangling Feet

   I’m borderline aqua-phobic. The line lies between that simple stance that my feet can touch the floor of the water bed and the assurance that drowning is not a possibility. It lies submerged in the sea-green blues of the waters, the fear of not death but suffocation unto death and the helplessness of it.

   Sixteen years of age was when I set out to Calcutta for the first time in my life en-route to Manipur. The train chugged away, pulling with ease the coaches that followed, sculpted with steel carrying people full of dreams. The locomotive sped at an immense speed as I edged my way to the doors of my bogie, swaying with the whims of the vehicle itself.

  It was noon and everyone had slept into obliviousness. The door was wide open, as I held the handles just on the outside and lunged my body forward for the erstwhile breezing wind to scream in my ears. Drawn to the avenues open to my senses; I merely collapsed and sat down on the steps, still holding on to the rails, feet dangling to the moving Jelly stones. The rhythmic lull of the wagons over the railway tracks seemed like the ritual of love-making between two as I closed my eyes; unaware of the people around me, singled out within.

   I don’t know how many minutes passed before my eyes opened to a change in sound, the return of the breeze alongside the summer sun. The rhythm was the same, but the echoes and sounds that emanated, completely different.  I gazed ahead to look at the calm blues staring back at me, its ripples moving from one to another, in constant motion.

   My fingers tightened around the handles as I peered down. Hundred feet below were deep waters that could devour me alive. It was the first time I saw seemingly bottomless waters below my own dangling feet. The initial flutters of anxiety and fear had drowned in the overwhelming feeling that was caught at my throat. I had never felt this comfortable, alive and fearless of waters. Transience and permanence loomed to and fro, as the moving waters coupled with the climax of the lulling pleasures put me in the moment, in complete awareness of my senses.

   I was neither in the past, nor an eon later. I lived that moment, completely, without the fear of suffocation and drowning lest I fall. In that unknown place, over an unknown water body somewhere in North-east India, I could then do nothing but smile as the cool wind kissed my face.
I have never felt that liberated, thoughtless and free in all my life, ever since.

~Hemu

I do NOT own this image. Source: Google images 

A Junction

There is this particular junction I cross everyday on the way back from college. One of the main roads in the city which is now a huge mix of one-ways,complicated yet simple routes that has been changed from its main course ever since the construction and all the digging began for the Metro Rail project.Envisaged by the traffic policemen in white and fluorescent overall-ed workers regulating the traffic with red flags, I am like the flock of sheep they push towards a certain direction every single day,to and fro the same route.

By now, after years of riding, I am more or less mechanical, with the music playing through my player and regular checks on the rear-view mirror, I am good to go at any point in time. But something struck me of late. I have been using this route for a long time before the construction process (with huge cranes) ever began and never noticed anything extraordinary. Just the same old schools and colleges in the locality, the buses and the ever impeding vehicular traffic. I guess that's the thing about two-ways. When you have the option to look and you don't? Or is it just that a whole lot of obstacles have been removed from the view for us to appreciate the possible beauty?

 

 I get a couple of seconds to admire the sky and the overall setting everyday while waiting for the traffic to move. Sometimes I wish it was more because everything looks so beautiful. The way the cranes' load stands in mid-air and the steel containers lie still- it's almost poetic, that I could keep staring at it for hours.  Sometimes, the sun is out in the open blinding me and at the other times, dark, rolling cottony-clouds set the perfect background for all the cranes and the tiny people in small helmets. A natural hierarchy exists there. Colourful hemets, little people, the containers, the cranes and the sky. What's more astonishing is the ability for the setting to change everyday yet appear similarly enthralling and beautiful. Some days, the crane is moving and some days its still, but for the sly wind to brush against it, different sky settings... but it's lovely, every single day. In the entire half hour ride back home, that's a scene I neither look forward to nor avoid, but enjoy just as it comes. In that singular couple of moments.

 I wonder if the junction is in new light or if I am perceiving it to be.Am I supplied with a new choice or have I trained myself to look around? Whatever it is, it is beautiful. Maybe, I could apply it to my life and move on as and when the signal turns green.

Do you have a similar story? Finding something utterly peaceful in the midst of chaos and loudness?
Please do share it with me here. I would love to know what I am missing out on. Cheers and much love! :)

~Hemu 

Leave where again?

Let me leave it here, I tell myself.

Building blocks and scourging for jobs;

pleasing people and being polite to the best of my being.

While I love the sea I live in; something suffocates,

and drowns. The little gasps of air above this blue trance

give me little yellow sunshine spots of joy.

Let’s leave it all and steal some money, perhaps.

Roam through the streets of hidden hills and solitary forests

in unity and love with the fresh air that I breathe

and the other girl inside of me.

Let me just go around those places,

Broken swings and overgrown jumpsuits,

wading pools and many a strip club

themed around little kids and the grandmothers in their prime..

appreciating whatever is left of the world, people. 

My perception too,maybe.

Or Let's go to the guy I stole the money from and buy him a soda.

And perhaps, create a little bookstore with yellowed pages

that many have flipped and

A little bell that runs through loud

behind the counter and across the carpets

as someone approached me and says:

“Got some books that smell lovely

and a colouring book for my daughter?” 

                                          Image above is from the internet.Not mine!