Bridging the gap between homes

Shifting from a third-world country to a first-world one has its perks, but the loneliness of immigration is one shared by all who moved

Yesterday as my partner and I chimed in over a video call, adding to the chorus, while my father cut a scrumptious-looking chocolate cake my sister got him for his birthday, I felt momentarily transported to Kurla; because everything that was in our field of vision was so familiar to me—the furniture, the angle of light from the window, the greenery that borders this space between the domestic and the external, tended to by my mother, and even the sounds that permeate and percolate through the day. I was, in fact, in our apartment in Tramin, gaping at the foggy, cloud-drenched landscape and the manifestation of rain, studded by the ephemeral formations of starlings in the distance, an un-choreographed sweep of flighty wings. Technology can be fraudulent that way, tricking you into believing you are present in an elsewhere moment when in fact you are dislocated, hinged in a context so different from everything else you’ve known; and that’s the distance that’s hardest to bridge, the ever-widening gap between the worlds you knew before and the one you are still in the process of inhabiting. It is also why you know in your gut that even when you are able to visit the elsewhere you left behind, you will never be able to truly return, because your being has been fundamentally altered. 

I often feel the invisible, un-surveyed and illusive boundaries between the ‘third world’ from which I come, and this ‘first world’ in which I am making home. Sometimes I find myself dissolved between them, unable to coherently articulate the particular loneliness as well as joy that accompanies the immigrant experience of re-settling. There is a legacy to the form of exile to which I stake claim: the refugee status of the woman who leaves her maternal home to shelter within her marital home. One has to acclimatise to different ways of being and doing than those to which one was accustomed. I hadn’t expected, of course, that such an elaborate span of time would lapse between my arriving here and returning to India, even if only to visit and conduct research, so the circumstances feel unusual. The longing has compounded and now occupies a more mythic space. I don’t confuse it with nostalgia. There are many things that punctuated the mundane back home that I do not miss at all: the incessant blare of horns; the traffic snarls; forms of uncivil behaviour, like skipping queues; the inability, sometimes, to listen to silence. The other day my sister called me during a long taxi ride. Despite the closed windows, I could hear the continuous clanging of horns which felt deafening and distracting. While I miss being able to imbibe the Diwali spirit, I am happy to be away from the ever-ensuing pollution that was always a by-product, firecracker ban or not. 

When I try to subtract the things I miss and those I don’t, I always find myself confused, and I tend to shame myself for preferring the ease and comforts of a first-world context, where things in my apartment don’t break down, where there is a smoothness to the mundane because it is filtered by civility. Yet, while I love that one’s privacy is respected, I miss, sometimes, our South Asian invasiveness. I find in my friendships with people who are born and raised in Europe, I am always cautious not to seem like I am prying into their personal consciousness. If I know they might be struggling with something, I wait for them to feel like they can share with me what’s on their mind. Such an approach is vastly different from how I am with my friends back home. I  feel secure that the glow of friendship allows us to ask difficult questions of each other and to offer each other greater access into our consciousness.

It is within the realm of spontaneous and sporadic conversations with random South Asian immigrants I meet that this peculiar loneliness is abated. For instance, in Venice, I walked into the take-away section of a restaurant called Oriental Experience, opened by a refugee to support other refugees. For about 11 Euros one can pick three items from different cuisines. Because I have spent too much time in Venice, I am happy not to eat local Venetian fare. When I arrived at the counter I heard Bollywood music but saw not an Indian or Pakistani, but a man who looked Afghani. Still nascent in my Italian, I asked him, casually, where he’s from, because it’s best not to assume. He said, Kabul. I asked if he understood Hindi. He asked me if I spoke it. We switched immediately. He was an Indophile and had taught himself Hindi through his exposure to Bollywood, just like the Albanian workshop participant I had had taught herself Italian through films. His name was Ali Khan, and in the next 10 or 20 minutes, we spoke to each other like two people who simply ‘got’ each other, and who understood how, given our individual backgrounds, returning home was no longer an option. We had to foray forward and make our future where we found ourselves now, planting both feet on the ground.

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

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