The Eventual Belongingness

 How long it has been. To sit and think about anything but next project, its people and the pains they bring. And life has kept happening, oblivious to the grand plans I dream up and minor inconveniences I frown at. At times, I stop in my tracks to realize I am in my mid-30s. Meaning, half my time has flown by. 

The very next thought that unfailingly hits me is about the outlandish dreams I once had so naively dreamt for myself. Makes me feel funny & wistful at the same time. 

I've come to work with people who are obsessively ambitious. Almost to the point of wondering if they know they are not here forever. They chase their dreams so feverishly that it's very fascinating and tiresome at the same time. On good days, it reminds me that it's not too late to dust the naive, outlandish dreams out of the dream-vault (that everyone has). On bad days, it makes me long for the lightness of being unaccountable for anything. 

I reach airports well in time. A little too well in time, often. It leaves me with a lot of time at boarding gates. Amid yawning adults and bored kids, I yank away at my laptop. When I don't, I think about who I've come to be. It pleases me to have become a resilient and an accountable person. I like that about the 30-something-me. 

Talking of airports -- being displaced from home makes me despair. I have always been a deeply rooted homeboy, who didn't bother visits but hated stays. In fact, I always have taken pride in being a homeboy who felt pinched by distance & the despair it causes. Lately, all that changed a bit. It's because I travel dizzyingly. I travel so much that I don't have time for the sweet melancholy of a displaced homeboy. 

But many hundreds of miles away, I have a home. One that I've built with a woman I trust more than I trust myself. A home that awaits my fortnightly return. A home where I seek and find quiet. 

My 30s as They Unfold

 It's funny how I once thought of Writing as my saving grace. It is now almost a defunct pastime in my life. They say, life happens. It has happened, for me too. As life's been happening, somewhere along the line, I have gotten busy in reacting to it, that I have hardly stopped for a moment to observe. 

What's happened in the last 3 years: more steps on the corporate ladder climbed, newer liabilities (in the garb of possessions) acquired, and torn between cities. While all that has been happening, quality of sleep has declined, appetite disturbed, and peace disrupted. I think I now get it when they say ageing slows one down. Sure, I'm still in my 30s, but that's a whole 10-years period after the phases of unbridled hope for a bright life. 

I am not complaining. I have a good life, materially. I don't have to check my banking app before making a purchase, small or big. That's a small victory, given where I started 10 years ago. But, there was this idea of a 30+ me in my head when I dreamt about my future in my 20s. A man who's made peace with his follies, and someone with a measured approach to things that affect him. Someone who's sure about his strengths, and painfully sure about his weaknesses. Adults tell young ones a lot of things, but what they don't tell you is they don't have it all figured out either. I guess, man's disregard for time's overarching superiority stems from his refusal to accept his smallness being amidst nature. 

Cutting to the chase, the man I thought I'd be in my 30s had always been an elusive idea. For, back then I always wanted to be a different man from who I was. A longing for an overall better-ness with no shape or direction to it. A few cues I had were: to read more, to think deep, and to emphasize on empathy, one day at a time, incrementally. 

I've got to thinking about these 3 cues lately. Have I read as much as I'd have liked to? Hell no. Like I told you upstairs, I was busy reacting to life. Have I come around to cultivate deep thinking? Nope, I have failed to build the agency to think deeply. Empathy? I guess that isn't a hard fail. I guess I've done okay in this department. 

Yet, there's a certain confidence I've come to possess. Perhaps, it's an awareness about self in the worldly sense. That I'm going to be around. Because, I think I've learnt to find a balance each time after every curve-ball that tried to throw me off. Or, this might as well be a delusion of confidence, owing to the last few good years I've had. But hey, there's no way to know, right?

As this cycle spirals forward, I just try to do my thing, and be kind.

Thoughts Mid-air

 The city looks tiny & flickering below.

As the aircraft soars its way through misty clouds,

the city below reduces to a faint ball of light.

I tilt my head gingerly to stare into the endless darkness,

and I find the old moon staring back at me warmly.

The moon - of which tales have been told & on which mankind has trudged,

reminds me of the 'giant leap' taken decades ago.

A leap of faith that attributed familiarity to this milky white ball of a moon

A reassuring though amid the indifferent sky - to know that man has only captured it, but not capsized by its vastness.  

A Transient Breeze of Warmth

 I took the left to take an immediate right that'd put me on the service road, as we colloquially call here. Something like an ignored, unassuming younger sibling of a prodigious, elder one. 

That guy was there, standing in his usual position - behind the iron block, which is a dosa pan for commercial purposes. He splashed a handful of water on the iron slab to wipe it off with a broom before he could scoop a few mounds of dough and make dosas for the impatient customers.

That sight has been etched in my memory since its capture. A sight that made me feel home & belonged. For inexplicable reasons - rendering me failed in articulating. I turned the wheel back to stay on the service road, and on my left, I spotted another figure whose presence reinforced the familiarity of the frame. A warm familiarity that put me ease at once, in my head. 

What do sights like these mean to me? Do they induce warmth because they constitute the 'home' I have built up in my head? If yes, does that make me a person frightened by unfamiliarity? 

I thin this longing for familiarity has inadvertently driven a lot of decisions over the years. While I have partner who's ever willing to handhold me into new adventures, my proclivity for the familiar occasionally teeters into obduracy. And, I recognize the sense of annoyance it can trigger in normal people, who want to explore new things in life.

As I write this, an early childhood memory flashes transiently. Of how I used to not let my mother go back home from school after feeding me lunch - and the maximum bargain I could take was an (obviously fake) assurance from my mother that she'd wait for me at the same spot for the next 3 hours until I'd be done with my classes. 

Back to the 2 figures who put me to ease by merely featuring in my mental image of 'home,' how oblivious they were to what they made me feel & how they added warmth to my mental imagery. Both of them - fighting their wars one day at a time, to be somethings and to not be someones, yet brought a rare warmth to my ever-freezing melancholic spirit. 

I may not see them after that day. Or even if I do, I may lack the mental faculties to recognize them. But I'll remember that they once made feel home, despite being unaware & distant.

A Journey with No Return

Wintry morning. He'd seen many mornings like this one before. When he'd helped his father deliver milk to townsfolk and steered his cattle towards the unsullied pastures for their daily grazing. 

Yet, this morning - he was feeling different. The air felt cruel on his cheeks that were already cracked from cold water splashes earlier. He stood under the emerging shade of the village's bus-stop - where buses to and from the capital halted to transport aspirations. 

He held an old, ragged duffel bag, probably acquired by his now-dead father where there had once been a prospect of him going to the city and continue his education beyond 10th grade, before that year's crop mocked them with abysmal buyout prices - like it had happened earlier and later, many a time. 

He had been to the city before. On multiple occasions for short visits - each visit punctuated with a sense of home he'd had left behind as buses that carried him gruntled ahead. Rides back home filled him with an increasing sense of aplomb with each mile closer, for he and his village were one and inseverable. 

This morning, all that was about to change, and he was painfully sound of that. He was making a one-way journey to the city. To start a new inning - as a watchman at one of the newly-constructed apartments, to break bread with people who spoke an incomprehensible dialect of his mother tongue, and used things he didn't know existed. 

He boarded the bus, and the bus lumbered towards his new home. 

At that moment, was he aware that: 

• He'd find a partner for himself and form a family in the years to come? 
• His kids would suffocate in the city for their smallness and in his village for its smallness? 
• He'd no longer spot pigs around - uninvited, yet unfailingly present around him in the village that were considered disgusting in the city and had no habitat to live and breed in? 
• He'd forge friendships that would enrich and belittle him at the same time? 
• He'd be slapped by one of the homeowners in the apartment for standing up for his inalienable dignity? 
• And he'd take it lightly by washing it down with a quarter of whiskey - something his old, village self couldn't have? 
• He'd grow gaunt, burdened with 15 cars to clean and 5 floors to sweep & mop before the sun rose every morning? 
• He'd forget how pristine the fresh air in his village felt to breathe? 
• He'd spend long, unending afternoons swatting away flies and salesmen from the apartment? 
• That he'd die in the city, amid his daughters, their partners, and kids - none of whom knew about that morning, its weight, and its irreversibility in his life? 
• And he'd be made a part of the city's soil, alongside tens of thousands of other, nameless, forgotten dead - who made the city it was and will be, on their backs and with their hands 

He wasn't.

A sense of Loss & Inadequacy

Today I am here, writing this. Almost a decade ago, I was in a foreign country - going about my business - perhaps walking towards my college from the train station. I don't remember the specific time and date of such a day but I am pretty sure I felt the same way I felt today. Out of nowhere a passing thought about my grandmother (maternal). Such thought must have brought warmth to my heart on that day, I can confidently guess. But today, such thought only disheartened me out of incapacity. 

My grandmother - she had never known anything about human ambition; for her ambition only existed amid the four, soot-smeared walls of the kitchen. Since she had not known about ambition, she had never seen a reason to worry about her grandkids' academic endeavours. She was just bothered that we didn't stay on the shady side in summer afternoons and ensured we ate full and beyond.

Me being an unenterprising boy by nature (but aspiring out of peer pressure), I had found great solace in her affection sans concern. I had hated the ennui of never-ending afternoons (blame the incessant power outages during Indian summers in the '90s) back then, but now I reminisce them with her breezy smile slapped all over my memory. I cannot forget the twinkle in her eye, the dimple in her smile and the cups of her large palms stroking my back when I hugged her.

Today's reminiscence of my grandmother was triggered by an old lady who works on my work campus's Building Management System staff. I and a colleague went down for our postlunch walk and I saw this 60-something lady, dressed in a depressing uniform, standing there accompanied by a broom and a trashcan, staring into the distant green of a manicured lawn. I noticed her alternating her stance between her tired legs. There, that stirred a pot of memories, served with a scoop of overwhelming nostalgia.

I stood there, leaning against a wall, at an obtuse angle from her, looking at her, allowing her to paint a picture of my grandmother in my head. She looked tired. She had a limp - out of dotage I suppose - yet she was there, at her workplace, toiling away and taking moments to stare into the manicured lawn before she resumed. The sight filled me with a feeling of sorrow I haven't processed yet.

I walked up to her and told her she reminded me of my grandmother. 

She flashed a faint, fagged smile and said nothing.

I hesitantly pulled out my wallet and offered my inadequacy.

'No no,' she refused with a sustained smile. 

'Can I buy you a cup of chai?', I meekly proposed.

'They serve us at 4 pm,' she said.

I gritted my jaws in loss of words when she picked up her apparatus and slowly limped away from me, but before that the smile sustained.

Both women deserted me. Grandmother lost her mind to Alzheimer's and estranged herself from me. The latter, she took away from me someone I wish I had. 

Unions end in either ways and more

We as a race are suckers for duality. Anywhere between right and wrong, anything between black and white unsettles us and unsettled, we try to grapple with those anywhere’s and anything’s. After a few failed attempts, we let them be and go about our lives.

Of non-platonic relationships, we are fed with and taught a very distorted idea. People unite, in the name of matching wavelengths or finding similarities with people amid their worlds full of dissimilarities. They long for physical and emotional warmth a person can offer, and they call it Love.     

Sure, there are people with whom relationships define you positively and there are people who break you with the sheer destruction their relationships with you yield. But there is a middle ground. A hazy, ambiguous, undefinable middle ground. There are relationships that leave you perplexed – torn between your inability of categorizing them and ineptitude of mending them.

You meet someone, call yourselves to be in ‘love’, make plans and work towards them, face obstacles in working towards the made plans. Somewhere in this sequence, life presents to you a facet or more of their personality that perplexes you. It welcomes you to the hazy, ambiguous, undefinable ground where duality loses its meaning and you learn to see versions of truths and fallacies previously unbeknown to you; where exactly your core goes through a grind and your moral standing is tested to its tooth.

You question the union that got you here, heck you question everything that led you and the opposite to this point of ambiguity. For some, meaninglessness triumphs out – for some more, grit emerges domineeringly and there are other ‘some’. Those who find out that they are lost. Those who find strength in such finding out and those who just feel anything and those who just feel nothing. Those who wander out in search of something and those who slump down, reminiscing the past.

Some come out shining and some let it mark the beginning of their fall. Some feel it as the microcosm of everything and something don’t feel it as resemblance of anything.

Unions end in either ways and more.