Life when vividly physical, life when enchantingly disembodied
An ode to my homes
While vacationing in India, it was customary for people to inquire about my life in Europe. Now having returned to Europe, it is customary for people to inquire about my vacation back home. As often with such questions, I have workshopped tidy, polite responses to both: “Life is good by all measures but I miss friends and family” and “It was delightful to meet friends and family but I need another break to recover from how tiring the month in India was”. For such deeply probing questions that demand nothing less than a distillation of my life’s two major backdrops, regurgitating a script feels like a betrayal of earnestness. What follows, hereon, is an attempt at sincerity.
In India, my life feels embodied in a clockwork with more mechanisms than when I am elsewhere. I feel alive in a form more vividly physical, more involved with other lives. In my loitering around the house, I maneuver through the furniture preferences of my grandparents, enclosed by pastel green of their walls that is distinct from the sober beige of the rest of the house. In my restful hours at home, my body metabolizes the nutrition deemed appropriate by my mother, portioned by measures I have long stopped questioning. My old friends back at home do not wait for me to visit and I do not wait through the year to see these old friends. We exist separated and, largely, unbothered when away. Yet, through some design, not one seems to require updates on another’s goings in life. I marvel at and soak in these resilient relationships, that have only compounded in nature and number over the years, and are reinforced neither with nostalgia nor novelty but a third thing altogether that I have failed to grasp. Much like how one displaces innumerable atoms of air with each step in a room, and how each gentle nudge of one’s finger ultimately culminates into a flurry cascading through particles unseen, in India as my life rows through time, its eddies seem to sway much more in their way and the ripples I make seem to travel slightly, but undeniably, farther away.
Although I witnessed natural sights aptly described only as divine, such as the edge of a valley where fresh clouds rolled up the hills and brushed my hair uninterrupted for an hour, and although I meditated in ancient antechambers and Garbhagrihas cut through the heart of a hill with craft unparalleled a thousand years later, and although I stood not more than a few inches from the Indus clay-tablets with mysterious inscriptions whose deciphering have enchanted me for years, such grand experiences coalesce into nothing more than mere garnish on my memories of India. The meat of the matter, instead, are moments that largely escape syntax and semantics but impress upon a deeper awareness of belonging --- a word of encouragement from an undergraduate professor I admire, wheezing laughter in response to my silly joke in a wedding hotel room, a fleeting recognition of my unexpected footprint on a cousin’s literary tastes and other instances when I felt a solemn pride in being perceived.
Amongst attending to dry formalities of forms and banks, colored graphite in my calendar; or research meetings and readings that feel like awkward entities puncturing through alien realms; or surfing on exhilarating conversations that feel like an immaterial group hug for my mind, there exist pockets of time appropriated by my father’s substantial social life. In these, partly polite, though not forced, and largely enjoyable still, exchange of pleasantries, I draw from a much constricted subset of greetings and thoughts: generally, the status of my career and professional plans, sometimes inquiries into the nature of life in the distant Rhineland and occasional interjections from topically relevant recent travels. While the cards of conversation I draw come from a smaller deck, each gets served to a wildly different audience. A retired Secretary of Commerce who hand-spun a Kurta’s worth of yarn as a gift for my father, the sweet lady managing a small bookshop who, on multiple occasions in my life, has brought me bowls of dry fruits to display affection, kindergartners and professors emeriti all partaking in a shared celebration of the good and an anxious accountability of the concerning with me in that moment.
In India, I feel as if I am alive in a physical form whose clockwork pertains to a far more mechanically intricate embodiment. I feel vividly aware of my decisions and routines driving the screws and levers in the lives of those around me. And I feel aware of the gears and cogs of my life being nudged by the turning and twisting of my surroundings, of the gentle rumblings of these surroundings, of the wear and tear from its forceful pressures, and of the satisfying beauty in the functioning of a complex system whose mere continued existence shines, victoriously, over its enveloping chaos.
I am back in Bonn, which in an oddly eccentric and yet perfectly acceptable practice I now call home. I wake to my own quiet breaths rustling through the pillows. I light vanilla candles before pouring my morning coffee, and occasionally play Arvo Pärt’s contemporary classical in the background. I admire the remaining brown leaves of the Creek Maple trees on my window as they murmur against the banded grays of winter clouds. In Bonn, I will do many things with my mind as I recline on an extremely comfortable chair purchased post weeks of deliberation. My thoughts will walk to the infinities of space and time as I struggle through asymptotic symmetries in my doctoral research. In my meditations, my awareness will delicately witness changes in an inner landscape so subtle and intimate so as to disappear at the slightest puff of scrutiny, let alone the noisy interference of the material world. Here, I will produce poetry that would aspire to communicate, and invariably fail, the esoteric features of the swirling fields behind my eyes. I will construct proofs and prose, in tones so varied that they seem like different languages altogether, to convey my understanding and my ignorance of how things hang together. In Bonn, I shall experience, regularly, hypnotizing sunsets on the banks of Rhine from my office window and sit in talks where sentences on slides manage to stir a primal excitement in my heart. Here, I will do many things to understand the structured and the sublime. But, I will do all this, mostly, as a disembodied orb of awareness floating, contemplating life and the world; not like in India, where I feel alive in a physical form whose clockwork pertains to a more mechanically involved embodiment.
In Bonn, there will still be Tuesday group dinners on tables of twelve. There will also be many beer pitchers raised high in warm Irish pubs, preceding passionate disagreements over cosmological singularities. There will be much welcomed institute gossip from board meetings that eat through journal club hours. There will be grave betrayals and broken alliances in long-drawn board games, and wonderfully fresh cakes that Martina generously brings over to my apartment. There will also be evenings spent dancing with Vips until sweat drips from my brows. Of course, I will witness feasts and fairs, children on bicycles in the streets, the hunched old lady with her cane fetching groceries, and other vibrant flavors of being human in this world. But, I will do all this, again, mostly, as a disembodied orb of awareness still, celebrating affection and joy with those around; not like in India, where my self feels more porous, more constituted by others, where the boundary between my life and that of others is thinner and where my being, in isolation, feels ill-defined.
Thank you for reading all the way to the end :)
was left with an odd sense of peace, beautiful work.
Kartik this was beautiful