scenes from being away
“Something good always happens when you go outside”
This is one of my favorite sentences. It is stolen not from some literary heavyweight’s essay nor is it wisdom from an obscure fictional character. It comes, quite unromantically, from my mental safe of intriguing messages post a 2014 Whatsapp-status-stalk session.
Back when Whatsapp bios were the passive-aggressive way to express yourself, when we were limited to 120 characters and there was no Instagram for us to Instagram, we were confined to using these little lines as a means of self-expression and identity. For some, it changed on a daily basis. For others, it stayed the same for years. I would — while waiting in line for something (all of the social media back then was a filler for the liminal space between one photo-worthy activity and another) — scroll through all my contacts, looking at their profiles. The changes in their life were often announced by the swaps in their photos, one-line-diaries. You could describe it as explicit if you looked for it, and discrete if you never cared to look them up. Sometimes there was a break up (no photo, empty lines), new love (a romantic quote, emojis), or just some pseudo-intellectual bravado (obscure wisdom from a fictional character).
Except for this person. This person’s (you know who you are if you are reading this) status was this quote for a long, long time, remaining unchanged through love, loss, graduation, migration, and eventual disconnect. Even after we stopped conversing, for many years after, I would occasionally search up their name, tap, tap, and read this line. Our Whatsapp chats remain empty — we have never again spoken to each other on that medium — but the line remained a source of unbridled and inexplicable comfort to me.
During the lockdown, I often returned to this phrase. Yes, I could leave my home, leave my city even and disappear into the woods that occupy the nebulous boundary between Delft and Rotterdam. But how was I to leave my mind? I wanted to go mentally outside into the good that was supposed to be out there. Instead, science mandated I stayed indoors. It was even critical — the difference between life and death — to stay inside. The line felt like a promise, a prophecy, and a practical joke all rolled into one. Repurposed for our times:
“Something good may not necessarily happen if you go outside. Most likely something bad might happen.”
So, when the numbers waned and the atmosphere relaxed, I stole an opportunity to leave. It was selfish but the planning of a holiday was somewhat a mental detour from the global discourse. Moreover, with some kind of travel, I felt I could pretend to retrieve some of my spatial agency.
Unable to leave the Netherlands, or return if I left, I decided to move to the farthest point along the radius I was permitted to travel — the very edge of the European continent: to dip my toes in the Atlantic hoping that the waters would travel all the way down to Cape Agulhas and wave to the currents that returned to kiss my peninsular home.
It hurts to think this but I do not know when — or how — I will see India again. As a student, I didn’t have the means to fly as I pleased and now when I do, there are no planes to take me there.
Scene 1
When we arrived in Ponte de Lima, our legs having traced the coastline all day, we found a large parking hall — open-air — by the banks of the river next to the main square. The river was famous — the village after all identified itself entirely in relation to the Lima. A river from the underworld, it is said that the Romans refused to cross it for they feared they would lose all their memories. Exploring the etymology, I discovered that it was known by another name — one that also birthed the word for “truthfulness”. How telling that, in the history of words, ignorance and truth have the same mother.
At the parking lot, signposts did not indicate a fee nor any restrictions. Trusting and oblivious, we deposited the car between several others and retired for the night in an apartment that overlooked the plaza and the river. At 1 AM, a sudden silence swelled indoors that startled us awake. We looked outside to find that the river bank was empty and our car stood alone, almost like an unlikely defender of a moat. We then noticed that our landlord had left us an imperative note: do not park your car by the banks tonight! Tomorrow, on Monday, the market (a once in 2-week occurrence) arrives. If it was not for him, how would we have ever known? An alternative reality rushed at me from the depth of the night: our car trapped between stalls, wares, and disgruntled hawkers. In my head, the sleepy town was dressed in imagined, vibrant, expressive drama. Would they have announced it on a speaker? Looked up our number plates? Would they have just carried on around our car or dented it as retribution for stealing their space? The truth however diffused this parallel existence and I remain a stranger to the what-ifs.
Scene 2
On the way to the market the following day, our first stop was at an amusing little store that looked more like a walk-in closet. It seemed that a hoarder had opened her doors and decided to sell everything she owned — a yard sale behind boutique glass. V called it a shop that sells everything but nothing.
My idea that day was to inspect the items every stall in the market to get some local education but I was immediately distracted by the general character of the town. The ware was displayed on the tarp, the conversations were loud and everyone seemed to be striving towards something. At times at the cost of the others. This was especially noticeable in their road etiquette. One that had seemed so foreign to V yet had instantly presented itself as familiar to me. I have never visited here before. The faded walls, crumbling concrete, myths suffused in different parts of the town. The lack of pretense amongst the populace, the wearing of time on their faces, unsanitized and raw emotion in their voices. They explained the products in tones hinging on righteous anger. It reminded me of home. I felt at home. And then the brief respite was immediately replaced by the burning question: Was home just an economic class?
This question was exaggerated by the loveliness of our lodging. Our room was elegant and almost painfully luxurious. It had useless scented towels and bath mats. Cupboards with smooth sliding drawer units that allowed you to enjoy noiseless midnight snack thrifts. I was a guest here but past the main doors and on the open street, despite the language barriers, I belonged.
Because outside, it was evident that rural Europe had paid the price of the wars and colonial efforts but not seen the fruits of it. Things and mindsets: both were scarce. So when I was homesick, was I really just homesick for an economic condition? Do we romanticize the hardships forgetting the cruelty and injustices? Do we only remember the resilience that was sowed in us? Do we just Stockholm syndrome our childhoods? (I immediately got the answer to my second question in a paper called Life is Pleasant — and Memory Helps to Keep it that Way! by W. Richard Walker, John J. Skowronski, Charles P. Thompson. You can read it here.)
My father would echo my observations a few days later. When I took him on a Zoom tour of the view from our balcony, he asked me to pause and peered at his screen’s display of the crowded part of town. “That looks just like ooru*, no?” he asks referring to the red roof shingles. Different countries have different bars of “luxury” but underdeveloped economies look the same. Poverty is not confined to a nation — it is a nation. Poverty is not hidden — it announces itself and audits your visual experience. And it was depressingly comforting in the way any kind of honesty is. I immediately vowed that henceforth my nostalgia should be illegal. If all I yearned was for this then I am complicit in perpetuating inequalities. If all my poetry sings about the beauty in the cracks, then my words are also tools of oppression.
Scene 3
No one expects to attend a funeral while on holiday. Neither did I. Yet, here we were: trapped on the shrug of a mountain road between a hearse and the rest of the village heading to work. Men in purple cloaks trudged wearily past us carrying a shield, a large cross, and funeral sadness. The people that followed — the ones to whom the funeral was a personal calendar (yet equally clandestine) event carried an air of funereal yet pandemic-appropriate behavior. I thought about how deaths come fast and in fell swoops but during a pandemic, the usual etiquette is disposed of for a more manicured and curated grief. No hugging, there is space within and without, all emotions that should be expressed trapped inside masks, postponed by environmental dystopia — all the grief that was supposed to come in waves now just ebbs like a receding tide.
The hearse moved on and then so did we.
Scene 4
In the following days, as we drove through enchanting valleys and fertile river beds, we often took an accidental exit that nearly recycled our journey and landed us back where we started. I thought about how little we engineer for mishaps, missteps, and miscreants in our personal agendas. An unforgiving highway with no possibility to course-correct is a frustrating one.
Products with elements that recognize flawed human behavior are often the best-designed ones. Why then do I never do this with my own life? It is crucial to remember that we are often at our sub-optimal and without a gap to fail into, we will forever be losing our way, forced to restart, and unduly stressed to perfect every second of existence.
My beloved friend, Yomi, neatly summarized this in a recent letter, in a story about always returning to buy a box of teabags despite wasting a handful (in homage to the saturated tea bags that went too cold too fast, thrown out, never enjoyed, potentials unfulfilled, conversations missed) “for the things we know we want, we like to allow ourselves some room for comfortable wasting”.
Comfortable wasting — I want to remember, is the way to enjoy the things we love, life included.
Scene 5
The last night of our trip, I had a dream that stayed with me for hours after I awoke. We were walking in a city. Each building was a song. We were in Spotify city. To listen to music you had to enter the door of a building. And the shape of the building would be the shape of the music. And we wanted to listen to the whole playlist. But there were so many buildings so we had to run in and out of them, through so many doors, tiring ourselves out but there was harmony in all the music we left unfinished. All the entryways we half opened, rushed through, windows left unlatched. The buildings sang together. It was an orchestra that we performed with our feet. Flitting from storey to story. And then I woke up.
Something good always happens when you go outside.
I return this sentence to the annals of my fragmented memories. Someday, I will reach out to this person and thank them for their words. My travels ended without much ado. I took enough pictures to have storage issues on my phone and I posted maybe two of them. A lot of things happened — some wonderful, some less so. The mathematic rationality of that sentence is still questionable but there are enough other numbers to occupy ourselves with at the moment. For now, this simple poetry I want to keep.
Notes:
*ooru: means ‘our hometown’ in this context
