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21 Jul
a lifetime ago in Darjeeling
Leading a life on the road can make your vision hazy. This globetrotting lifestyle of the past years, particularly the last one, has been rewarding, challenging, and fulfilling as far as my proclivities for adventure and excitement go. When your backpack is left half-packed, and you have pillows, clothes, shoes and toothbrushes strewn all over from Dubai to London, home is just a state of mind.
Singapore was always home. It was here where I was born, here where I endured an education I disliked, here where I learned, loved, lived, and came into my own. Singapore was home because home meant the same neighbourhood from the day I was born; the same home, one filled with laughter, love, and conversations in three languages across three generations, often in the same sentence. It was here where I sat plucking beansprouts and white hair for ah ma, not at the same time, threaded her needles, and grimaced at the Teochew opera they listened to on the radio every day.
When you live your life on the road, and you pack up and leave every five days, never staying in one place for more than three weeks, life elsewhere moves on often without you. Now home is the same one, but in a neighbourhood I don’t recognize. I can’t sleep from the endless construction noises, and the house is shockingly empty. Dad, mum, me. And the birds. Things have moved on without me, and people too. My old haunts are no longer the same. My friends are mostly abroad. Or gotten married, given birth, migrated, mourning their recently deceased parents, no longer really here. The more I stay the more restless I get; I feel like I don’t belong. Like I don’t know this place anymore.
I don’t even really live here. I’ve moved back ‘here’ from the Middle East, but ‘here’ means Kuala Lumpur, where I now rent a house and am setting up a base for myself, no matter how temporary. Friends, love, soon, dog and home office. Some semblance of sanity, some semblance of a home.
In the midst of the ups and downs of the past month, and the struggle to move on with my life, the way everybody else seems to have, the only thing that seemed to be able to make it all better was to run back to India, into the welcoming embrace of the motherland that’s adopted me. It’s hard to describe how, but it has something to do with how the moment I touch down in that country everything makes sense to me and is immediately warm, fuzzy, and lovely. I’m in Madras tonight, then going to float about in a boat somewhere in Kerala, then Bombay, where ‘home’ will be the same the way I left it, with the same people and the same places. Life doesn’t go on and on, but India does.
Triplicane and Arcot Road, Colaba and Victoria Terminus. Chowrasta and Park Street. Singapore may have given me life, but India is love.
