#19 Postcards from Trivandrum
Familiarity, change and exciting news about a brand new chapter
Dear Reader,
I write this to you from my home in Trivandrum, where I have been spending the last month with my mother and for a brief stint in between, my sister. Some visits to the homeland are tumultuous. This one has been one of those; one of those strings of fleeting days so eventful that life takes on the form of a rapid river. All you can do in times like these is cling on tight to whatever help is offered and go wherever it takes you. There’s little meaning in trying to control days like these. I fly back tomorrow but for now I rest here by the window, lace curtains sheltering me from the scorching afternoon sun, wondering where Time went to hide.
I have been visiting Trivandrum during the month of August for a few years now. It is special to be around family and familiarity during the Onam season when the city lights up in every conceivable colour and there’s a happy bounce in every passer-by’s step no matter how old, no matter how young. Of course, it helps that Europe comes to a summer standstill for all of this month. There has been an uncharacteristic cool breeze that sweeps across the capital city night and day – a respite from the merciless Trivandrum sun and just cool enough to ward off the little pricks of sweat that tightline each of our foreheads.
This month I visited the temple down the lane a few times. A massive shift from the cynical days of yesteryear when I was struggling to grasp the role of religion and god and taught ideas of spirituality and internal personhood. But this year, as soon as I landed, I knew the 700 year old neighbourhood temple was beckoning to me. I obliged. The heart wants what the heart wants. All these unbridled questions still continue to rage on my inside I won’t lie, and I continue to write a firm ‘No Religion’ every time I am asked to share such personal details. However, I have recently come to appreciate that I don’t need to have all the answers all at once. I don’t need a ready reckoner of beliefs, nor do I need a box to commit myself to long before I am dead. Life lives in the in between. I am not skilled enough to succinctly define my being on a short dotted line. Whom am I answerable to really?
Over the course of the last years, I was curiously full of guilt every time I considered paying a visit to the temple, on whose courtyard, my sister and I practically grew up. I felt as though I’d be committing an ungodly sin by entering the physical realm of a religion whose rubrics I actively try to defy. I was in some sense blinded by the massive power wielded by the measly I. The categorically skewed and misplaced sense of self-importance which drew me to believe that my presence was big enough, weighty enough, important enough to alter the course of lives and beliefs around me. It is not. So, many an evening this bygone month, I walked down the lane past the houses and shops whose contours I know like the back of my hand. Past the same trees, their everchanging foliage; the same people, their everchanging facades.
I sat under the great Banyan in the temple courtyard, alone, watching green parrots dash across the blue sky, devout temple goers circumambulate the house of the deity lined with oil lamps that come to life at twilight. A pocket of calm nestled into the hubbub of city life. I filled my lungs with fresh, unpolluted air. Ears perked to the inimitable silence broken only by treetops rustling in the breeze, polite cries of birds near and far, and the low hum of prayer escaping the mouths of people I knew and didn’t. I let my bare feet touch the familiar ground, the heat of the day diffusing all the way up my legs. My body was reacquainting itself with an old friend. I watched people pray with their heads bowed in reverence to their beliefs. Every now and then someone stopped to ask me how I’ve been. A few polite words to spare and a great deal of affection to match. It has been a long time, they said. It had indeed. I watched fat caterpillars chew holes through lush green leaves of flowering shrubs; a trail of red ants make their way down the blackened, multi-tiered stone lamp. Old stones dressed in the emerald forgetfulness of moss. I stood with cupped hands in front of the deity whose face is as familiar as a long lost friend. I ran my fingers down the calloused trunk of the sacred Koovalam clad in generations worth of leftover sandalwood paste. A nameless bird cried from the treetops. Perhaps those visits were not to pray or to partake in taught piety as much as to enter a portal into a space where I have a face, a name and a story; a portal into my childhood that I spent frolicking around this ancient construction built on myth and folklore, where god is said to live, where wishes are promised to be fulfilled. Or maybe god truly exists only for those who need it. Maybe on those days under the cool shade of the great Banyan I did need god and everything else was just an excuse. Who knows…
While I am here, I try to spend my evenings seated on the verandah step watching the silhouettes of the coconut palms sway against the backdrop of a familiar sky dusking in warm shades of orange and pink and purple. The same spot where I wrote my first lines. And during these moments, I am overcome with nostalgia, the dubious sentiment that wordlessly unites each of us making lives far away from the ground we were raised on. A inexplicable craving for all the things we once knew, a melancholic yearning for things that are not ours to keep. But after all these years of having lived on foreign soils in the hazy dichotomy between immigrant and expat, I can now see a pattern, more internal than external, that invariably surfaces during the four plus weeks that I spend in my hometown each year. And this pattern begins with nostalgia but seldom ends with it.
Coming back to Trivandrum is a special feeling. Always. But as is with every other experience in this life, emotions are always mixed. They are transient. Once I get to Trivandrum, it takes time for me to find my space once again in this house – to settle in. It takes time to reacquaint myself with family, even with people as close as my mother and sister, for change eludes none. We transform every day into different people and it takes time to familiarise ourselves with the living, breathing elements of each other beyond two dimensional phone screens in which we see censored versions of each other for eleven months at a time. In flesh and blood, things are different. You see new facets in old personalities – things that you like, things that you don’t. But being around family reminds me time and again that I don’t need to like every part of every person in order to love them profoundly.
T.S Eliot wrote: “We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.”
Once I am here, I also take time to fall asleep at night especially because I am no longer used to massive sleeping spaces. I am also not used to seeing all of these bedrooms that were once filled with people and laughter, empty. Now that my sister has also left this nest, there is an unquenching urge in me to spread myself thin in order to fill this house my father built, from corner to corner – an impossible task, especially because my being here is a temporary affair. Amma has her cats though! And they give such quiet, unpretentious company! They teach you their prissy little ways, but most importantly they teach you that effusive, selfless love has little meaning. They teach you to be autonomous, to relish solitude like a piece of spicy, sundried lime, to pay attention to your own breathing as if it were the most beautiful song.
As these final minutes tick away on this old wall clock and as I watch pale yellow moringa flowers drop languidly into remnant pools of last night’s rain, the pit in my stomach grows a little bigger, my poor heart beats a little faster. Leaving is never easy, settling ‘out’ is harder than settling in, but this time round, there’s more to leaving than I have known before. This time, it’s also about learning to begin again.
Yes, I have some news to share.
I am moving to Scotland in exactly a week – six days and a half to appease the gods of precision – as I have been selected to do the MSc in creative writing at the University of Edinburgh. I am moving for a year. It’s hard to believe but this time this is all in pursuit of an enduring dream that has patiently yet unremittingly lingered by my bedside.
Newness and change await on the other side once again, I know. So does a life away from our home in Paris, far away from the warm comfort and security of nestling into the back of Sriram’s neck in the middle of dark, moonless nights. Far away from the feeling of home, far away from familiarity that took years to nurture. But so does a formalised plunge into a career path that I have dreamt of but needed time to find the courage for; perhaps a life in the company of likeminded individuals who have walked farther than I in this writerly life; and with hope, an escape out of this immense solitude of thought and practice of putting words one after another on the excruciating blank page yearning to uncover truth and memory. Maybe without change, there’s little to this life and therefore, change we must, change we must endure and change we must welcome. Or so I tell myself…
Until next time, hopefully from Edinburgh.
Anjali
Anjali, you evoke nostalgia and write about complex emotions like no other person I know. Congrats on taking the formal plunge into creative writing - looking forward to more of your stories. All the best :)
Wish you the best! Your writing is so profound and intricate. Love it!