Maybe it’s a 40s thing, or maybe it’s just me projecting my top-of-the-mind thought on to others, but these days, ‘the place to retire to’ is a recurring theme in many conversations with friends. Once upon a time, in line with Pico Iyer’s “Home is not just the place where you happen to be born. It’s the place where you become yourself”, Bangalore was an obvious choice. A few years ago, Cochin got back into the consideration set, as I veered more towards who I was than what my self image was. The mind and its narratives.
During a recent trip to Cochin, when a classmate described my school-self to D, I had a moment straight out of a Kazuo Ishiguro book. He is one of my favourite writers, and at least two of his books feature narrators with flawed memory constructions. In the books, it is fascinating to watch the peeling of reality against the narrator’s reconstructions. Ishiguro is kind, and usually brings the narrator down gently. In my case, I was first shocked to realise how I was like one of his narrators, and then pleasantly surprised at how my friend remembered me. Maybe he was being kind. But this isn’t the first time. When a similar recollection about me had happened with one of our other classmates during a reunion a few years ago, I had brushed it off as his false narrative. Because my own perception of who I was then was different. But after this, I realised that this was the key to Cochin behaving like a magnet!
In Capital, Rana Dasgupta wrote – ‘when one becomes homesick, it is not a place that one seeks, but oneself, back in time.’ Despite my conscious mind’s narrative constructions, my subconscious probably remembers it more accurately. It remembers someone whose sense of humour did not have the cynicism that an adult life gifted it. Someone whose whistling skills seemed like magic to his friends because it was not self-conscious. Maybe, by pulling me back to a place, the mind believes it can also pull me back to a time and a self that was happy with itself. That him who I was.
And maybe it’s not just that. Before I left Cochin, I made it a point to visit an old hangout. An aunt’s home. My mother’s cousin, whose granddaughters were roughly my age, but insisted on calling me ammava (uncle) especially in public. My memories of that place and my aunt, and these I am sure of because there are physical spaces that could testify to it, are ones I cherish and am deeply grateful for. The place and the person brought a sense of warmth and security to a teen life that was troubled by loss, and a mind that did not even realise it was unmoored. I see the afternoons and evenings I have spent there as an incomparable act of kindness. A refuge from the world at large.
So maybe what drags me back to Cochin is a little more than who I was. It is also about those around me at a certain stage of my life. The friends who made me feel special. The people who made me feel secure. And places that are so deeply etched in my memory that it would be impossible to feel lost even now. Even as I realise that the places and people may no longer be around and that this construct is one that fits the current idea that I have of myself, I also think that somehow the mind will conspire to project an environment that can anchor me.
P.S. As I began writing this, I had an intense sense of deja-vu. Very meta. I had gone through these thoughts before, I was sure. And indeed I had. That is somehow reassuring.