Warping and Wefting

Muscle memory is a weird thing, I thought to myself while plugging in my laptop on a study table I’m using after six months. I’m back home in India for the Easter holidays. The clocks in London go forward but my wristwatch still follows IST-5:30. I’ve never understood daylight savings time, not that I don’t understand the industrial reasoning behind it, just that I see no point to it. Then again, I do not see the point to a lot of things. 

I wonder how the movements of my hands have still not changed – a choreography I embodied so deeply that living in another country and using another table has still not replaced this dance in me. I marvel at how naturally I sit at the table with my diary and pen, and it feels like I’d never left, as if those six months were a memory from a parallel universe I created for myself. It’s not like that’s impossible. I’m infamous for dwelling in those imaginary worlds more than I should. I’m infamous for living so much in mental utopias that when realities did not match my visions, I used to blame the people in my reality for not being more utopian. 

But then I cough four dozen times a day and my body remembers that we were away from the dust of home long enough for it to feel like a temporary annoyance. It’s funny, a lot of Indian patriotic songs talk about the scent of the homeland dust. I loved how meticulously cleaning my room in London regularly was not something I worried about, for there was no dust there as such. I live on the top floor. But even the streets of London seem to have no sign of dust or dirt and in many ways, that is utopian. It is only when you’ve been away from the smell of dust that dust begins to have a scent. Otherwise, that smell is just signalling the existence of something that needs to be cleaned. I try to remember if I knew the smell of ink in London but all I could remember was the smell of ink from cartridges I had carried from India because of how well they fit the fountain pens I had taken from my dad’s drawer. 

I try to remember what petrichor smelled like in London, but I know that the smell invoked by that word holds images of the garden tended by my mom, with monkeys sipping water on sunny afternoons from a drinking bowl hung from the neem tree which grew from the seeds of a neem tree that had fallen in a storm during the monsoon following my grandmother’s death. That neem tree is strong. I have seen it grow from a sapling to an ontology, both for me and in my utopian world, for the other creatures surrounding it every day. It has seen me worried about its fragile growth where I hated that the wind would bend its thin branch. It has seen me wondering how the ivy growing around it can have bigger leaves than the same part of that vine spread on the “lawn”. It has seen me scared of the chameleons and garden lizards running over it while admiring the squirrels drinking water from the same bowl as the monkeys and sparrows. It has seen me reread the first novel I’d ever read, underneath its shade. It has seen me being carelessly in love with music. It has seen me falling in love with poetry. It has seen me quitting on science as a discipline only to explore science as a curiosity. It has seen me learn how to tie a hammock around it. It has seen me doubt its strength to hold me. It has seen me learn to trust its magnanimity. 

On my third morning back home, my sister asked me if I’ve been missing London, and I immediately say I haven’t. Don’t get me wrong, I love London, but when I’m home, I’m home. When I’m home, I’m in a world I’d been consciously and unconsciously missing and looking for and finding and trying to recreate and fall in love again, in London. I love London, but I don’t know if I belong there. I’m learning, I’m exploring, I’m trying to build myself up and have a network and find work and live by myself. But it’s not easy although my friends marvel at my energy to run around doing everything that I had wanted to do all these years that I had stayed at home during the pandemic and learnt that some spaces just do not foster the kind of growth I was looking for. But sometimes, the people I talk with in London speak a language that makes me wonder if I even know how to communicate, let alone be honest in my communication. I try to be as honest as possible, but I wonder, at times, if the “kindness” in small talk is genuine curiosity about a person’s being or a mask of self-preservation to hide from the fact that perhaps warmth lies in conversations that have the potential to hurt. Or perhaps that’s just humankind everywhere. 

I did my undergrad in English. I have been writing in English since I was a teenager. But the moment I fell in love, my poetry changed its zubaan to emote very automatically in Hindustani: a combination of Hindi and Urdu used in Bollywood songs. In hindsight, the first time I fell in love was more a revelation about my relationship with poetry than any person. It was not till then that I even knew that that language found any belonging within my being. It was not until I learnt how to curse in my mother tongue that I learnt of the emotional connect I could possibly have with that language. And suddenly, I have turned into someone who does not pride herself on being a spell bee champion and topping some English Olympiad nobody now bothers to think about. Suddenly I like the fact that I never spent the money on buying that really cool looking T-shirt with a caricature of Hitler on it holding a flag saying “Grammar Nazi” on it. Suddenly, I enjoy the amount of spelling and grammatical errors we Indians can make; not because they’re cool or that I enjoy correcting them (I do. It’s still one of my favourite pastime activities when on a road trip or when reading a menu. We Indians love English because it can show we are learned people. We haven’t mastered it, though. Then again, can anyone ever keep up with English?) but because I love that we are trying, regardless of the fact that most street vendors or little chai stalls will have completely different ways of spelling ‘mayonnaise’.

I love London, but professionally. Theatres thrive there, relatively. Theatres may not thrive at home, financially, which they do not anywhere, but we do embody theatricality so much so that regardless of its occasional non-existence, theatres dance here. I love London, but London is not who I fell in love with. London is where I fell in love for the first time without any Hindustani poetry, for London is where I fell in love with Hindustani poetry all over again. I love London, for London is how I fell in love with home.