The nebulous notion of home

The immigrant experience is often marked by existing in between worlds, trading one form of longing for another and latching onto largely idealised memories of the place where you used to live

The sun angles itself differently already. Where we live, the birds now chirp shortly past 6 am. It is late summer. The first lot of apples are being harvested. The wineries are readying for the grapes to come in. Boxes are being cleaned with high-pressure water hoses. The grapes are steadily sweetening and look robust and almost mature. The swallows have begun their annual meeting around the elementary school to plan their migration. There is a nip in the air in the mornings. It is neither warm nor cold, just right, just perfect, just pleasant enough. Our balcony will still serve us another two months until the cold of winter starts to settle in. I have mixed feelings about these transitions. There are things to look forward to, undoubtedly, but as the year starts to fold in on itself, I am reminded, once again, of another year passing without having had the comfort of family or friends near me.

It isn’t just that I moved to Italy. It is the remoteness of where I live that isolates me from all the worlds I have known before. Friends make plans to visit Italy, but I am rarely factored into those plans because where I live is not on general tourist maps is not quite on the ‘grand tour’. I saw some ‘society’ pics the other day of the designer Masaba’s baby shower and I felt a lot of envy. I felt sure that if I was back home, someone would have cared enough to do something like that for me. I have not managed to achieve such intimate friendships here, and being so far away from home also alienates me from the intimacies of my past friendships. Sometimes the solitude is welcome. But there are moments when it feels too much to bear and I miss being social. 

I suppose this is why immigrants tend to seek each other out. I suppose this explains the existence of South Asian communities the world over. But the remoteness of where I live precludes such a reality. The minority nature of my identity makes it harder for me to find connections. I spend many days acknowledging the schism that is my daily life: on the one hand so much beauty, so much green, so much wild, so much auspicious festivity, so much seasonal change and so much access to art, architecture, Italian cuisine, newness of language and other skills. On the other hand, I mourn the absence of my people and feel oppressed by the bureaucratic systems that make it so hard for them to come visit me. I grieve some of the circumstances that complicate my notion of home.

You can’t have it all, I know. And I understand that so much of immigrant existence is composed of this living in the in-betweenness of two worlds, trading one form of longing for another, and knowing you can never really go ‘back home’ because you have some idealised memory of it that is outside of reality. 

Yesterday, I was reading an article in the German-language newspaper offering locals here tips on managing ‘tropical’ summer nights. It sounds like a first-world problem, but dealing with heat in a place that doesn’t have fans or air conditioning is uniquely challenging. One suggestion was to take a lukewarm shower before bed. Never a cold shower because the body’s tendency after a cold shower is to warm itself up. Reading this brought back vivid memories of summer nights in JNU, when I had to literally wet the bed with water so it was cool enough to sleep in. Taking a shower was difficult because in my hostel we only could access one bucket of water a day per person. I thought back to my life in Delhi, especially the last ten years when I suffered daily from water shortage and needed to rely on a tanker for water thrice a week. I tell myself I am so much better off where I live now. In Delhi, in the peak of summer, a cold shower was an impossibility because the pipes would heat up and the water was invariably hot. But in winter, the geyser could only sustain hot water for a five-minute span. Being able to take a shower with shampoo and conditioner felt like a luxury.

A friend asked me the other day if I felt more at home in Tramin now. We were in her family’s holiday home in Sulden, South Tyrol. I had to say yes, because it’s true, I do. If I venture out in the morning for groceries, I will likely meet many people I now know and will greet many more. I have become a part of the town’s pulse, which is a way of being ‘at home’, I think. But the other day, I received multiple messages from an editor at a publishing house who is reading my current manuscript. She had the most genuine praise for the writing and I realised that the prospect of having this work published here, in German, felt like a portal, a way of breaking the fourth wall and putting myself out there amid the society I currently live in. Perhaps being ‘seen’ as a writer where I live is more important to me than I had previously imagined. Not as an act of hubris but of humility.

Deliberating on the life and times of every woman, 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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