Regarding Home

going back, standing at the edge and turning around

Jun 26, 2023

The slowness of these couple months is a little unbelievable, in the realest sense of the word. There’s no shock factor, there’s no implication that good things have happened beyond my sense of courageous faith in the notion that happiness can be weaved into my life as well. It’s a drastically slow month, each day a capsule, isolated from the events of the previous day. Maybe consider it more of a snow globe, each day that is, and there’s a flurry of events, not always in a flurried motion. There’s heat, always. There’s redundancy to my actions, and there’s action in my redundant body. I feel like it is all a chain of events, and I am yet to reach the reactive end, the burning core. There’s enough at stake to terrify me of everything. Friends are not friends anymore, there’s a disparaging emotion striking on the hot metal of stability that I seemed to have been developing, in hopes that I would carve words out of it later.

The afternoons are getting insipid. The pain in my neck doesn’t let me lie down on the cool floor anymore, so that’s one thing lost. I lie down on the bed, a new floral bed sheet adorning years old mattress upon which I have dreamt of being fucked. The curtains only let the shadow of the sun enter the room, and I feel like I am in a dusty afterlife, people I have loved exploded into minute particles. I think of what else is lost to time - radios, television subscription, jokes in newspapers,and if we move beyond time to add more elements — aunt to cancer, grandmother to guilt, a girl to motherhood and marriage, a man to manhood, everything contained inside this house, trying to exist.

As I lay dying on my mother’s bed, I let the memories I built in this house fall on me, getting inside the new cracks that have formed while I was away from home. Tea stains on walls now painted over, books that hold all of my adolescence, letters from people who were lovers, oil stained sheets, jewelry boxes with my old Kathak necklaces and other accessories, too many things. You can never move out. I am now spread over cities. I have grown in size, you just can’t see my phantom limbs. I am eating people up, and I am the hunchback of New Delhi. My New Delhi is my New York. I think of Olivia Laing in this moment, I think of her describing Andy Warhol, and how he hoarded; his numerous bags and things he carried with himself when he went out, to keep people at bay. I remember reading this in the uncomfortably bright reading room at university, feeling cold and hot, all at once. I remember underlining it desperately, staring at my tote bag as if it was an alive being, my journals, notebooks, stationary and cosmetics constituting the organs. I remember mentioning it in passing, as a joke to one of the closest people to me, hoping to hear something that would assert I am fine. That’s a question I want others to answer for me, holding my hands tenderly in theirs, kissing my eyelids, saying “you’re fine, let’s get you to a bed and let you sleep.” I don’t remember how the conversation ended, I tend to laugh louder than everybody to drown the aftermath. I tend to exaggerate. I laugh loudly.

Carmen Pinart / the last time I had red hair, I had stability quite unlike the social media rule book that red hair is sign of insanity.

Since my parents had left my brother and I and went to look at the now altered ancestral home in some corner of India, I felt like a ghost in the house, free, unseen and unfelt. I laid on her bed throughout the day, unless I wanted to go out in the mouth of the city. Nights would be spent with the balcony door ajar, craning my neck to see as much as I could of the moon, the clouds covering it, a passing train of earthly wonders. At times it would rain, in the stillness of the night, and the moon would seem to start spreading, like a thick circular piece of chalk, the milkiness dissolving in the lake of the night. I remembered a sher (a couplet that resolves itself into a poem) by Parveen Shakir on one such rainy night.

Itne ghane badal ke peeche,

Kitna tanha hoga chand.

Behind such looming, dark clouds

How alone the moon must be.

Picture yourself as the moon’s lover, let your grief turn into the grief of distance, and mourn her.

It is the end of June, the cusp of summer and monsoon. There’s wind, there’s sun, there’s breeze, there’s heat. Nothing is amiss, nothing is empty. We are suspended in time and space, in the middle, while getting stretched in both directions. The past and the future are taking you with them, and the present never existed. What you love right now is already over. The wheels of time have turned my life into a train of memories and taken it far from me. I think of what John Murillo has said; maybe memory is all the home you get. I repeat it until.

I had no reason for coming home, yet I came. I spent a month running around, escaping the walls and the roof and the voices inside. And every night I’d return to fall back on the same bed that thirteen year old me would fall on. The only difference is, she would never sleep, and I am now half a man.

The anger has turned into something quiet, perhaps turned into a part of me. I cannot bite back, I am not teary eyed and stoic. I have grown soft. Parents get harsher with time; unable to scratch at the surface, their words and actions get pointier, like a needle, like a knife. As their image of looming, scary figures fades in your heart, all you’re left with are two people who were there in the same house as you. You tolerate, you shake your head even, like they are misbehaving children. My brother and I laugh now. Yes, things are better at home.

Today is my last day here. I am not done packing yet. There’s more books to choose from. I am eating mangoes, probably the last of this season for me. I will eat something that nobody else will ever make for me, a dish that reminds my parents of their home, their childhood. I will not sleep tonight. About a couple hours ago, I was in a store picking out something sweet to eat, when I realized today was my last night in my city, for a long time. I felt teary eyed and stupid and lost. How will I go back and be? Who is going to be there for me? When nobody is here for me, it’s a comfort. But when I am away, it is merely me being alone. So I think, and turn to the words of other people, as I always do. I think of Rilke, who has been a companion in the way best friends are; but your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths.

I think of Bruce Springsteen, and how I will feel his words reverberate inside of me when I see the scenery from the train window tomorrow. “I was slipping over the streets of my childhood… No longer a painful player in my, or my town’s history, but a passing and impassive observer.”

As for my city, I am glad she lets me in, I am glad there’s still space for me. I will come back, my love, you and I will be together for longer, next time.