Untethered

In moving from India to the US at the time that I did, I, more than perhaps others who came before me, inherited in my heart a vacuum whose depths I have been trying to plumb quite unsuccessfully for the last ten years. In moments of stillness when I can muster enough courage to weigh a life in balance, I become aware of the existence of a loss whose essence appears impossible to communicate. In brief disjointed flashes of arbitrary cuts of memory a scene from a movie Koshish comes to mind (and why I remember this inconsequential scene is as incomprehensible to me as why I remember the movie at all). A sunny day on a beach, a clenched fist, and sand slowly draining from between the fingers. The harder the fist clenched, the faster the sand drained. Some poignant dialogue, I am sure, followed but I do not remember it. I do not need to, because I feel its real, alive context in my nerve endings; I understand, in the deepest of ways, the metaphor of the slippery sand. Unlike most Indians that I have known, I do not have a place where I could fix my past to. There is no single city where I could authoritatively place myself in, there is no set of alleyways which exists in my memory as the definitive labyrinth of childhood, there is no special set of friends whose company I can trace back through the decades. In the absence of these concrete markers I think I was inadvertently forced to create surrogate connections to more abstract ideas, to rest my nostalgia not on the foundations of a certain house which might appear with soft edges in the mind's eye but with vague symbols which stood for certain values which were deeply Indian. A particular set of Ghazals, for example, which remind me of nothing concrete at all from my past but make me aware of a lovely, idealized crystallization of what meant to be Indian, if only in a childish, innocent sort of way. The sum total of these nostalgic markers indicate to me a world which actually might not really have existed outside of my idiotic, easily led, imagination. I was an idealist then which explains why I am a cynic now. Back then, however, I searched for Malgudi in the real world and, unfortunately, I found it too. Now that I go back to India, I am deeply dismayed to see that my metaphoric Malgudi hasn't stood the test of time, that it has shriveled and disintegrated against the onslaught of money, ambition, greed, and, well... reality. It's as if I woke up one day and found that my past was extinguished. All that remained was a faint whiff of smoke and a dark, slightly warm wick.