On the move, but at home

Be it Tramin or Venice, for months I have been repeating to myself these words by Simone Weil: ‘We must take the feeling of being at home into exile. We must be rooted in the absence of a place’. Pic/Rosalyn D’mello

There must be a way for me to tell you about my here and now without it sounding like a brag, without it seeming insensitive, without coming across as though I was consciously setting out to elicit your envy. I have been absent from social media because I don't know what to make of my life away from where you are, especially in the face of so much calamity, so much tenuousness, such colossal grief. Seconds after I unlocked the door to my apartment in Venice, on the third floor of a guest house in Castello, I retrieved my phone from my bag and panicked at the sight of a missed call from my darling friend and ex-flatmate, Simar, from Delhi. I froze for a second, then tried promptly to call back. I felt in my body the same dread that has been following me for weeks wherever I go, the very same angst I had felt all day in my veins two weeks before, when I had come to Venice with my partner. We were excited to soak in the luxury of an empty San Marco square, to be the only six or eight people at the cathedral and finally encounter the legendary mosaics first-hand, not behind a sea of other visitors. On our last evening together I heard not-so-good news from my sister, which made me panic for my brother. I tried to reassure myself that he was in Dubai, which was already a best-case scenario.

Mercifully, Simar was calling to brainstorm about a work project and my despair quickly transformed into joy... an unbridled elation on account of feeling needed by her. We spoke about home, what it means to be in this moment when you may be home but you cannot visit your other homes. For months I have been repeating to myself these words by Simone Weil, who must have lived them, especially on the cusp of having to leave her familiar worlds to escape the Nazis. "We must take the feeling of being at home into exile. We must be rooted in the absence of a place." This line, a stray thought among a constellation of profound insights, has felt comforting, because it offers a roadmap for negotiating the complexities that mark our present. "It is necessary to uproot oneself. To cut down the tree and make of it a cross, and then to carry it every day."

Over a weekend chat with Jason, a Goan-intellectual-soon-to-be-priest, we considered the possibility of meeting in Venice, where I have been assigned an apartment from the beginning of May until July 20 because of my ongoing mentorship work as part of the Ocean Space TBA 21 fellowship. We had spoken longingly about the idea of ‘domesticating' Venice with our presence, being there not as tourists but with people with a shared Goan heritage. This meant we ‘got' each other. We'd inadvertently always been somewhat European. Recently Jason shared an article, "When you think of the Renaissance, think of Nagasaki, Goa and Oaxaca," to which he had been alerted by the scholar Ananya Jahanara Kabir. "For Goan readers of this article, which I really recommend, if you want to save Goa, and by extension Goan culture, you need to embrace the larger world, and the classical culture, from which it was born," he wrote by way of introducing the article by Stuart M McManus, which, Jason felt, served to buttress his argument, that "we need to see Europe as not merely limited to the continent, but rather as produced in various locations - extracontinental Europes - which produced a new universal European Christendom - particularly in the Philippine context - even as an older Christendom was collapsing".

Understandably, those who are still getting to know me in this, my present avatar as an immigrant wife, someone who is in Europe by virtue of marriage, mix up my place of origin. Since I brandish a Bombay-Goan identity, my ten years as a Delhi resident further complicates my narrative. To add to the confusion is the continual echo of my actual birthplace - Kuwait, where my father worked for some years, as did my mother, before returning to India around 1989 before the Gulf War. I carry so many histories of origin, so many different points of contact and exposure with me wherever I go, sometimes it feels like a whole universe, complete with its own galaxies, all tangentially connected to the people around me.

Because all the homes that are not the home I am currently making in Tramin feel so far away in the aftermath of the Pandemic, they have become even more alive and animated. My body has become differently attuned as it practises forms of trickery - mental manipulations designed to both amplify and reduce the alienation. Home is the displaced tree I'm carrying like a cross, except with each step the hanging roots attach themselves to my path so that I am fixed and mobile at the same time.

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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