Blooming in a new landscape

Exactly a year ago, we arrived in South Tyrol. Without realising it, on account of the pandemic, I had ‘moved’ out of not only my apartment in Delhi but also India. I became an immigrant. Pic/Rosalyn D’mello

The 8th of June marked exactly one year since the emergency evacuation flight my partner and I boarded from Delhi landed in Milan. Our exit had been deliberated upon by various urgencies. His visa stood cancelled. I needed to return to Italy so as not to default on the criteria stipulated by my residence permit. Besides, I had given up my apartment of eight years in Kailash Hills at the height of the first wave of the Pandemic. I remember still how restless my body felt on the flight. I recall vividly my inability to do anything meaningful to pass the time, which would eventually serve as my motivation to pursue crochet as a method of meditative immersion through the anxiety of itinerancy. Leaving the way we were compelled to induced traumas I am still processing. I know I kept seeing in the hovering clouds the faces of people to whom I never got to say goodbye, the loved ones I couldn't hug, or had no time to even call. I had to give away so many objects I had held dear, had to shed clothes that had felt like an extension of my bodily consciousness, not to forget innumerable books, and diaries. All the marginalia inscribed upon them that had felt like an external brain cell began, already, to feel displaced, and the book I had been writing since 2017 had got totally scrambled up, as if the pages had been forcibly torn away from the intangible spine.

All I was able to do on that uncomfortable ten-hour flight with its stopover in Cairo was observe the landscape, bear witness to the vastness of the terrain that was physically distancing me from the worlds of my origin, the contexts within which my identity made some sense, at least to me. When I had embraced our decision to marry for the sake of facilitating a bureaucratic ease that was necessary for the future of our relationship, I hadn't at all imagined moving. My partner was in fact excited to settle in India, possibly in Goa. Until we processed the formalities that would ensure the residence permit and were suddenly told that a prerequisite was that I spent no longer than six months away from Italy. The politics behind the renewal of the first year-long permit would convert me into a full-time resident. I'm still untangling how little agency I had in the matter.

I still remember how our fatigue-drenched bodies exited the airport. I was overjoyed to see my father-in-law waiting at the exit to handover to us the keys of his car. We didn't want to risk any contact with him. He left with his nephew and we drove separately to Tramin, struggling, along the three-hour trip to stay alert and vigilant amid the fatigue. It might have been almost midnight by the time we arrived at the apartment where we were to quarantine for two weeks, at the base of the Sankt Jakob Kirche, where, three months later, we would be married by a priest.

The past one year has mostly involved trying to hold myself in place. During our quarantine, we took long walks in the vineyards leading up to Sankt Jakob, and I remember the uncertainty with which I walked, constantly afraid of tumbling downwards, as if the inclined earth were eager to reject me. The Alpine landscape with its constant undulations terrified me. Each bout of breathlessness felt like a mockery of my city-based upbringing. Settling in has necessitated relearning how to walk with both feet on the ground, one step at a time, but through coordinated efforts, relinquishing the tendency towards either bodily apology or defensiveness. To survey one's site of adopted domesticity one must sense the earth through one's feet, navigate texture and terrain by imagining the softness or density of soil.

Since the 8th of June, 2020, I have made massive strides. All my discoveries and revelations are somehow scripted upon the soles of my feet. It's intriguing that I spent much of February last year in crutches, on account of a torn ligament. Walking after such an injury felt like a privilege. I am still re-piecing all the fragments of my life that lie dissipated, either in storage, or with a friend, or that are now part of someone else's possessions. It's why the sequel to my first book is so delayed, because the narrative can be told from so many vantage points and I'm afraid now of tumbling downwards and not being able to pick myself up. What should have required half a decade, I've had to manage in the span of a year, replanting myself, grafting my body within a landscape to which I am not indigenous, acclimatizing to weather patterns alien to my family ancestry, adapting to a diet not native to my gut. These days I feel like the stalks of lavender bursting into bloom, their scent percolating the landscape. I stand out but also fit in.

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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