It’s been happening on enough recent Cochin trips to be given the status of a habit – visiting The Grand hotel for lunch. The food is predictably good, though they take liberties with what can be called ‘meals’. But there’s more to it. The Grand has been around for as long as I can remember, and in the otherwise rapidly changing landscape of my hometown, it offers a solidity and anchorage that is rare and appealing. This time, we had this guy seated right behind us. 🙂
Another habit, which is even older, is shopping from Malabar Chips – for friends, colleagues, and us. Some of the people working there have been around for decades, and I told D how I’d watched them change over the years. “..all the faces that made up my childhood“, as Rana Dasgupta phrases it in Solo. It made me think how we probably notice changes in others more than they themselves do. By the same token, we don’t notice ourselves change.
On the walk back home, we passed the house of a school teacher of mine. She was standing outside, chatting with a couple of other people, at least one of whom I knew. Completely out of context, she obviously wasn’t able to recognise me. I walked on, not stopping to wish them. I am sure they’d have been very happy to see me, but alas, this inexplicable shyness! In myself, this is something I have seen unchanged, though my reactions to it have, over the years.
Later, on the way to the airport, we talked of relatives who we had been told were grumpy and arrogant. In recent years, my interactions with them, my own understanding that the world and its folks aren’t so easily explained, and my relatively better knowledge of the self have given me a better sense of the labels they have been given. They’re shy and/or introverted, just like me.
I have been that label before, and many others. I have lived through the age of fleeing them, setting up a life on my own terms beyond them. I have lived through the age of understanding that those terms require prices to be paid, prices that are not so obvious at first glance. Traded one set of labels for another, for things I thought I wanted. I now live through the age of knowing (or at least trying to know) the difference between my self image and my self. It requires an understanding of my anchors – what makes me behave the way I do – places, people, circumstances. Not to label, just to acknowledge, and understand. In every trip home now, maybe that’s what I seek unconsciously in all my interactions.
When I think of people who have stayed (on) in Cochin, I have tended to think of them as existing in a bubble, living in a set of definites – a structured environment whose characters, places and even circumstances know their role. An aura of safety and stability, if you will. I realise now that this is the figment of an eager mind, one which desires to have its own labels find a place in the chaos, and its imperfections understood. In a land far away, in a place it used to call home, it thinks the solutions to all problems are a night’s sleep away, just like old times. And maybe that is indeed the idea of home – a set of folks, places and circumstances who will draw you out, labels notwithstanding – and make you feel at home. But maybe it exists in the mind, ready to be summoned at any place. To paraphrase Rana Dasgupta in Capital, when one becomes homesick, it is not a place that one seeks, but oneself, back in time. Back in Bangalore, as I reconcile myself to a working week ahead, a voice inside me seems to whisper, Close your eyes now, you’re home. Indeed I am.
great