So long, see ya later

I’m halfway packed, nearly ready to go – Wednesday morning I reach Bombay and Sunday night I reach Bangalore.

7 months after my first big move, I am moving again! New city, new people, new language, new food, new experience.

I am sad to be leaving Hyderabad (I know I’ll be back here in a short two months but I have this feeling that it might not be as straightforward as that!) mostly because I will miss some of the people I have met here and because this house is really my first home of my own. I mean, yes, it’s rented, and shared, but I’ve added to the collection of mugs and knives, helped pick and pot and water the plants on the terrace, given useless inputs on the color scheme of the living room, and picked out my own curtains and got to have colored bedsheets for the first time in my life!

I know most people haven’t had this hit them for the first time at 25! But for me, this is a big shift. I guess I am more of a homebody than I’d realized.

Someone asked me today how I felt about moving around so much and living in a state of flux. Honest answer is that I grew up like this, although god knows my wonderful mother made sure we always had a sense of stability and security. Let’s just say I’m familiar with the feeling that makes you hoard good-sized cardboard boxes because you know you’ll need them in less than a year to pack up and go.

I still remember our annual run to the supermarket and Target to collect extra boxes they had lying around so we could move. Fortunately I’ve lived these months with the awareness that I better be able to fit my life into one and a half suitcases.

What I will miss most:
My familiar ride to work and spacing out for exactly seventeen minutes
Sunlight filtered through the blue and green curtains in my (old) room
The walk up to the kaman and back, saying hello to the watchman at the corner who keeps an eye out for us
The donkey family near the temple – they’ve just had a new addition, a beautiful woolly baby who’s still tottering about
My favourite yellow dog who has recently taken to climbing to the top floor of the building under construction next door and standing on the rooftop for hours staring at the skyline
Ordering ‘Andhra Meal’ for lunch and getting paradise in a parcel for forty rupees
Drives up into Jubilee Hills and dinner on a rainy night at Ista
Movies with my flatmates and delicious dinners and gossip

What I look forward to in Bangalore:
Yoga classes at 6 am
The incredible weather
Coffee!
A new set of people to get to know
Learning Kannada and maybe Spanish or French
Surviving without a kitchen and no guilt about not being bothered to cook
Greenery

What I hope for in the New Year:
Knowing what I will be trying to do this time in 2010
Love
Patience
Being calm and able to let others be as they are!
Keeping alive the connections that matter and letting the others go gracefully

Now, to finish the other half of the packing and turn my thoughts forward and onward.

Good night!

Belonging

I give up on pseudo-poetry, it doesn’t quite do justice to what it really sounds like in my head. I am going to have a guitar here in Hyderabad by the end of the first week of September – I may have to soundproof my room to make sure I don’t drive my sweet flatmate up the wall!

Hyderabad. I don’t know what I expected when I came here – I came here for the work, and I’ve met interesting people, and I don’t feel as lost as I thought I would. But still, it reminds me more than ever of how comfortable I am in Bombay, and it reminds me that “India” and “Bombay” are NOT synonymous.

Here, funnily, I’m reading a lot of American literature. I’m currently reading both On The Road and Oil! by Upton Sinclair. I’m so glad I finally have my own copy of On The Road. It reminds me of why I love this language.

What’s interesting is that Jack Kerouac’s first language was a sort of dialect of French that his parents and other immigrants from Quebec brought with them to the US. And I can’t believe that never found its way into our discussions of him in Lit class. It makes me feel better that at least now, all these years later, he’s as ‘American’ as any other writer. It makes me feel better as well, about not really belonging in one place in particular. Maybe the road (or the modern equivalent) is my space, too – an undiscriminating rolling ribbon of connection, cutting across and getting right into the heart of what it is to be alive, no matter where you are.

I suppose I really hope that my journeys eventually lead to a place where I understand myself better, too. Lately, again, I’ve been told that I’m ‘mature’ for my age. It’s flattering, it’s a compliment, I suppose, but I still can’t help laughing when I hear it, because my closest friends know how ridiculous I can be. I treasure the fact that with the people who know me the best, and the one who knows me best of all, I can be as silly and as profound as I like, in any language I try to express myself in, and not be concerned about maturity or childishness, because those treasured few understand that it IS possible to be contradictory and happy and living, joyously, in a hundred colliding moments at a time.

This is an experiment in just writing the first thing that comes to my head, which I haven’t done in a while, and it’s a nice change to not try to craft my point. Yes, I meander, and tonight I sleep all the better for it.

Maybe, tomorrow, something that makes me sound more ‘together’!

First left inside the Kaman

Magic
in an empty mucky street
where the donkeys walk with tied legs
and the muted clopping of their feet
is the prelude to the dumpster on the corner
urinal for men and foodstore for the cows
which snuggle up to the steel for the afternoon

The temple opposite is painted brightly
The old couple that sits on the steps can’t see the color
But they know who we are that walk down the road
They hear the coins in your pocket, the guilt in your throat
They hear the rain rolling off the cows’ thick hides
and they call out, softly, as I walk on by.