Nestled in familial bonds

In Tramin’s bucolic setting, I’ve learnt to keep my feet on the ground. Pic/Rosalyn D’mello

The harvest has only just begun in Tramin. Walking around I find it humbling to think of how time has marked itself on my body. Last year I'd worked part-time for another farmer, helping him when he was short of hands. It was gruelling work that required my limbs to be in constant alignment with those of the machine that was transporting us through each row. I'll never forget the cellular ache I would experience after six or seven hours, when I was afraid I wouldn't be able to walk home from the parking lot. It's tempting to think of it as exaggeratedly dramatic in retrospect, but not when I think about how far my body has come along since then, the ease with which I can now manage uphills, and the grace with which my breath can accommodate the altitudinal shifts. It's hard to think there was ever a moment when I thought we'd move between India and Südtirol. I realise now that this feeling I've acquired of being ‘at home' has emerged, inextricably, from the emotional investments I have been making ever since I landed here last June. Had I the opportunity to move easily back and forth between the homes from which I come in India and this one I have been trying to build, it would have taken a lot longer for me to arrive at this realisation - that becoming indigenous involves placing both feet on the ground.

It sounds simple enough, almost facile. It's not possible to walk without placing both feet firmly on land. But I think there's a lot of profundity tucked beneath the surface of this sentence. It might have something to do with gravity; the idea of not just locating one's feet on the ground but also allowing them to hold the body's weight and to fluidly venture forward. For someone like me, who has trouble orienting herself in relation to the sun, frequently unable to distinguish North from South in the absence of daylight, staying in place, being here for as long as I have in the early stages of my ‘settling' here has been transformative. Bearing witness to the landscape as it sheds, stands naked, sprouts, flowers, and fruits, all the while changing hues feels like a privilege. It must be the only way I currently know of positioning oneself within existing relational systems. One of the reasons I've been so preoccupied by the intellectual discourses around indigeneity as a mode of embodiment is because I feel surrounded by the consciousness of land as an entity to which humans are bound.

I like to call myself a non-native informant, and I like to think of my columns as dispatches about my findings and conclusions. I enjoy playing the role of the outsider looking through and into and making speculations and being proven wrong, or humorously approaching the rituals that serve as local traditions. Not once since I moved have I regretted moving away from the urban. Not once have I lamented my decision to dwell within the rural and remote. I'm still processing why that is. For instance, I was sure I didn't want to move to Berlin or Vienna, cities in which I could potentially have been able to earn a livelihood, given my background in arts criticism. I remember being apprehensive about falling into the same trappings into which I had become immersed during my decade in Delhi. I was done ‘networking', talking to professional strangers in a manner that discreetly boasted my accomplishments so as to be taken seriously. Maybe I craved the anonymity that comes from being known through a relation. Here in Tramin I am identified as my father-in-law's daughter. Because he is such a kind, generous, and loving person, I take a certain pleasure in this identity… But I admit I also enjoy being introduced to people by either him or other members of his family. I like the pride they take in my personhood. I suppose I like that my relationships within Tramin expand through familial networks. It's different, and exciting, but it also, often, allows me to access my childhood and adolescence; the unique experience of growing up in a little enclave of five buildings and one bungalow, but within the larger diverse universe of Kurla, where I have had different identities, as my brother's sister, Rosalyn, Millennium Queen, and, eventually, my mother's daughter. My life in Delhi was premised on discovering my selfhood in the absence of the familial, which offered me distance from my loved ones, but also allowed for a more generous appreciation of all the specific details that made my family and our context so unique.

In a few weeks, hopefully, my partner and I will board a flight from Milan to Dubai so we can finally meet my entire family, except for my sister and my brother-in-law and spend a week with them. I sometimes fantasise about what it will feel like in my body to hug my mother again, to touch her soft skin; to embrace my father as he tries to lift me up, to compare my niblings' height against my own to gauge how much they've grown. None of us are the same people we were when we last saw each other. We have all been transformed by the circumstances that shook our collective worlds. How I have missed the frenzy and chaos of our togetherness, my parents' cooking, the easy laughter and inside jokes. I am longing for the relief of bridging, momentarily, the enormous distance imposed between all of us, this enormous duration of physical absence.

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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