The fluidity of arrival and departure

A view from the flight from Dubai to Bergamo

Leaving my family felt like the hardest thing I've had to do in the last few months. Unlike during the pandemic, I was blessed with the opportunity to spend time with them, hug them goodbye and experience the closure of a farewell. But that didn't make it any easier. I didn't want to let go of my mother and my father. I was already wishing I had more time with my sister. She was emotional and teary-eyed. I seemed calm and composed, but on the inside, I was already sensing the pangs of not knowing when I would see them all again. ‘Come visit us,' I said in vain, knowing that the journey to where we live can feel daunting. We took a flight from Goa to Dubai, stayed one night there so we could rest, then, the next evening, we took the flight to Bergamo. We arrived at 10.30 pm, too late to commence the train journey back to Tramin. Anticipating this, we had already booked a hotel room so we could crash and begin the final leg freshly bathed and caught up on sleep. Indeed, the next morning, we savoured our complimentary breakfast and made our way, arriving in Tramin in time for lunch at 1.30 pm.

It's in moments like these between ports of departure and arrival and the in-between transit zones that I feel forced to acknowledge exactly how far away I am from all the homes and families that I have built and known all my life. It's not like living in Berlin or Paris, cities that are easy to reach, with many connecting flight options, where a return trip is a simple airport ride away. I live in this tiny town in the Italian Alps and as I glimpsed at how it was nestled within the Etsch valley as the train pulled up towards our station, I felt bewildered by how lushly green everything appeared. The little rain we'd received the day we were leaving and a few times after had sufficed to transform the landscape. For the first time since I moved here three years ago, I felt the relief of returning, of feeling like I was ‘back home', even though I was already missing the other homes: my brothers' apartment in Dubai; my bestie's apartment in Delhi, our home in Goa; and I didn't even dare to think about Mumbai because we couldn't put it on our itinerary.

As we inhabited the white noise space of a cross-continental flight, I thought about how my life had turned out, all the unexpected decisions I made that seem in opposition to the plans I'd carefully laid out for myself even ten years ago. When I'd turned 30, I was sure I had already arrived at the life I had wanted to live. I had my own apartment, even if it was on rent. I had my ‘scene' with my friends. I was part of so many different communities. I felt definite about my decision not to have children. Seven years later, I have found myself married, mother to a child, an immigrant living miles away from the comforts of everything familiar. Yet, I've never been happier. I don't say this to validate marriage and motherhood. The happiness is not a by-product of these institutions, rather, it is the consequence of my choice to allow myself to be loved in ways I had never fathomed, and of giving myself the love I always knew I deserved. Moving to Italy didn't exactly feel like a choice. I was caught somewhere between bureaucracy and pandemic. I applied the life lessons I learned from my immigrant parents and ended up making a home for myself here. I am hoping that being in possession of a five-year stay permit will offer me the luxury of returning to India more
often whenever I can afford it.

One of the things I learned on this trip is that points of arrival and departure are not fixed, rather, they float in an endless vortex and their position within the axes of our timelines is continually in shift. They are tangentially related to the physical act of travelling, of moving from point A to B to D, but in terms of lived experience, when we consider the narratives of our lives, they remain in flux. Because one's being is also continually shapeshifting around the nucleus of the self and in relation to the environment. I have been thinking a lot about the philosophy of arrival… what it means to arrive either early or late, and how the fact of punctual or tardy arrival is either enabled or disabled by capitalist systems. I wonder what it means to be ‘on time' because I wonder whose time is considered the norm.
As I resettle myself after the three-week journey, I feel sure it was so special not just because so much time had lapsed between my last arrival, but rather, because I was able to inhabit time differently. Instead of already contemplating my inevitable departure, I focussed on whatever constituted the here and now. It means I have fewer photographs with my loved ones, but instead, my memory of our time together is so much more concentrated and speckled with sensory detail. It has taken so much self-work to arrive at this point. I feel sure it is how I want to continue to live.

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D'Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx

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The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper