Roots
My son paid me a high compliment today, inadvertently and casually. When he asked if there was rice for lunch, I remarked that he really loved eating rice. To which came the reply: Naturally…you’re South Indian, and I have your genes.
My Bombay friends argue that I’ve now lived many more years here than in Madras and I should call myself a Mumbaikar. But the rain in this city used to sound different to my ears for the first so many years. It had a more aggressive patter and yet it brought no relief from the lowering sky. It didn’t fall in implacable sheets like it did in Cochin, nor did it cover everything in a fine mist like it did on cool November mornings in Madras.
Was it homesickness?
Hiraeth is a Welsh word. Variously, it could mean homesickness; nostalgia or a longing for a time, place or person that means home. My dark mind likes the idea of it but that’s romanticising the idea of home in my head. Nostalgia is only a thought away from obsession and I’ve run from both most of my life.
So is it hiraeth that for years, I missed the places of my life? The people were mostly gone: dead or lost to time, conflict and distance. Maybe I missed these people when I returned to the places I used to love. Or did I want to return to the places I called home because of their presence there?
I don’t have the answers. I just know that there was a hollow feeling in my chest and my throat dried up when I did go back. I wanted to leave as soon as I arrived in these places. I stayed for as long as I could bear it and then I hurried back home.
But where was home? In some ways, I have lived a life without deep roots. I don’t belong in my hometown, where I was born. I have very few memories of Baroda. I was very young when I lived in Cochin but I have a basket full of good memories of that little town: Fort Cochin, Allepey down the backwaters, the Jews and Gujaratis of Mattancherry, the Chinese fishing nets and the Naval Base. Still, I couldn’t claim to be a local. I don’t speak malayali and I’ve forgotten the streets and sounds of Ernakulam.
Madras is different. It was my city – I used to know it with a familiarity I took for granted. I had just begun to put down roots there when life turned upside down. It was very hard to settle after that. I purposely exaggerated my otherness, wanting no ties to this city which had stolen something irreplaceable from me. But all the denial in the world couldn’t stop Madras from becoming a part of my DNA.
I call myself South Indian and I know it might sound like cultural appropriation, that nightmarish rabbit hole into which we have all recently fallen. There is fierce resistance, and rightfully so, by various cultures to fake or wilful imitation of their history and lifestyles. I’m quite sure many South Indians I know will laugh at my claims – I don’t speak any southern language, I’ve lived away from home for three decades now, and I’ve lost the very ethos of southern mannerism, accent and attitude.
But to me, there is no way out of this. All that I know, all that I am, comes from growing up in Ernakulam and Madras for the first twenty two years of my life. When I left for Bombay, I left pieces of my heart in Foreshore Estate, Varachal Falls, Mattancherry, Jew Town, a silent graveyard in Royapuram, along Adams Road, Second Avenue and Besant Nagar Beach. My taste buds were born to the taste of fish and coconut, soul food to me is tomato chutney and thayir sadam or appams and stew. Nothing smells as good as gundumalli, or sandalwood soap or filter coffee. These are emotions as much as tastes and smells and sounds.
And yet, I have never truly belonged to these places. Always a familiar stranger, no place was ever home. A friend who is no longer a friend used to delight in mocking my foreign-ness: the fair skin, the mini skirts, my accent. All red flags to his insecurities, and I, in turn, flaunted these differences, to perversely prove his point.
I left Madras behind and came to Bombay thirty years ago. I love Bombay for what it gave me: freedom, independence, no one judging your every move. Bombay has grown on me. Not the physical city but its no nonsense attitude. Finally, it is now home. It is now a familiar place. I know all the short cuts and the one way streets, the local patois trips easily off my tongue and if needed, I can cut the taxi driver or BEST bus like a seasoned local. Emotionally too, it is my home. My family and friends are here. My book was written here. I love the sky and the sea here, the way I once loved the deep blue sky and brown gray sea of Madras or the beautiful green edged backwaters of Ernakulam.
Today, when my son casually referred to my south Indian genes, something clicked inside my head. I was out on my balcony, pottering about as I do, thinking without thought about this life long feeling of unrootedness. A peepal sapling has rooted in a crack in the wall. I’ve been on the lookout for a peepal to plant in a pot and so I tugged at it without much hope of dislodging it. Sure enough, it clung on stubbornly. Maybe that’s what I am. Not unrooted at all, but deeply and stubbornly rooted in whichever place I find myself. The growth happened in the midst of inhospitable terrain, flourishing in places I was never meant to be. And if circumstances yanked hard enough, I pulled up my roots and found a new place, a new way to grow.