White Pele

 

Every time the World Cup rolls around, I look back at the last one to get a sense of how much life has changed. The last one was three and a half years ago; not the usual lngth of time. In football terms, not too much has changed. Messi is still incredible, Ronaldo is still standing in the way of a really talented team’s success, United are still a waste of time, Arsenal continue chasing a European trophy, and Haaland is still a robot. My life could not have had a more eventful three-and-a-half-year period. I watched every single game of the Qatar World Cup, partly because I was aware that it would almost certainly never be possible again, and partly because the world’s game really is one of the few things I just cannot get enough of. Ronaldo had just given an explosive crybaby interview to Piers Morgan that made his exceptionally poor run even more enjoyable than usual.

I watched the 2018 World Cup Final at auditorium on the first day of law school; I remember thinking at the time that the degree was going to be so long that I might even watch the next World Cup in that place (which I did). I watched the 2022 World Cup Final in a Shisha bar in Kuwait, with a number of my friends whom I had not seen for years. When this World Cup opened, I watched it with a group of strangers at a summer school on a Greek island. In the gap between these two World Cups, I finished my LLB, LLM, and have just started a PhD. I have moved house more than one a year in that period, and moved countries almost once a year. A move to Europe, a return, and another move. Enough time to fall out of football and begin falling back in again.  

The stock taking happens every World Cup. Football loses more of its soul in each edition. It feels like the sticky mess of a trying to eat a piece of chocolate that really should have been in the fridge first. It is sweet, tastes like you were promised, and you still wish you had not opened it. I can have a moderate expectation that I will still be here when 2030 rolls around, and that Germany will probably still be ass. In that way, it is similar to that auditorium where I watched Mbappe announce himself to the world; it feels like the start of something.

Leaping

 

Last week someone asked me where I wanted to go after I complete the PhD. They were asking where I would like to live, and I said I had no specific aspiration of that nature. Every place I have lived in feels like home some way, and hostile in another. Of course, not always in comparable degrees. Today I spoke to a colleague nearing the end of his PhD, who could not wait to pack up and leave to his home country. It makes me really curious, to imagine having such a sense of longing for any specific place. Later today, I will take a train to The Hague; it is one of the first places I truly felt like calling home. But even that visit would not have meant all that much to me if not for the fact that I have loved ones waiting to receive me there.

During the conversation last week, someone asked if I would be interested in going back to Kuwait. There are many reasons that does not interest me. One of them is the fact that the people that I think of when I think of Kuwait are scattered around the world now. My sense of home is not strictly geographic, and Kuwait is not the same country that I spent my childhood in. As a person who moves cities often (almost four times in the past year), I try to think about the kind of things that would motivate me to upend my life and start over. It has always been related to work or education. I am sure work will ask this of me on more occasions in the future as well. I know meaning has to be supplied by myself on occasion. One of the first philosophers I ever read was Kierkegaard. I was attracted to the idea of tweaking leaf of faith to leap to faith. Faith as not the scary gap between a secure past and a secured future, but the secure insecurity you jump into. He’s also the one who talked about how life can only be understood backwards even though it must be lived forwards. My life does appear to make a surprising amount of sense looked at backwards. Maybe there is something to be said for just taking things as they come. I feel good about my most recent leap to faith.

ddmmyy

 

There are many ways to attack the question of how one might live. A couple of years ago, a professor asked me what my plan was. Disinclined to say I was clueless, I said I was taking it one month at a time. He laughed and remarked on how ambitious it was that I did not mean to take it one day at a time. Now trying to convince myself that I am equipped to work on the doctoral method, I am not entirely sure how I should answer the question of living. I spent last Saturday mostly indoors, feelings a weird sense of guilt about not making anything of my weekend. I would not define it just in terms of productivity; there is, a particular sense of wastefulness you feel spending most of your time on the phone. If I spent an equivalent amount of time just staring into space, it might feel less wasteful.

This blog visits and revisits the idea of running away. A contradiction I have felt in that respect is how I can define running away if I do not identify myself with a place. I am running away, among other things, from someone else’s concept of belonging. How can I explain to myself the profound sense of loss I’ve been experiencing since arriving in Germany? To describe it as homesickness, while not untrue, would be reductive. The relative permanence of the move this time – that it must last at least as long as one doctoral thesis – asks of me to prepare for the kind of stability that I have not come to expect since the pandemic. For the first time since, I have a certain idea of where I should be this time next year; and that certainty comes not without its share of melancholy. If things are not so unstable and chaotic, it feels more likely that I might get found out.

There are, on the other hand, some things that I have come back to in a relatively non-deliberate attempt to feel in touch with my ‘roots’. I spent my two years in the Netherlands largely unconcerned with what was happening in football and with Manchester United. On Saturday, however, as I sat feeling a vague sense of guilt, one saving grace was the incredible sense of joy I felt from watching Gabriel send his penalty to the Hungarian sky, denying Arsenal the opportunity to win what they wanted most. Like any self-respecting football fan, I maintain that there is no sense of joy greater than watching a team you hate lose. I am, despite myself, looking forward to the World Cup hoping Portugal wins it somehow so Bruno Fernandes can scam a Balon d’Or. I don’t know if there are conclusions to be drawn from one of my longest-standing passion being reignited so. If it is a sign of me adjusting to the idea of something new and hopefully long-term, I think I welcome it. Maybe I can even look forward to taking it one year at a time.  

മോൻ ഹാപ്പി അല്ലെ?

 

About a year ago I woke up before dawn from a dream I was convinced would make an incredible story. I went for my journal to note it down. My head was feeling the kind of heaviness feels like a command to go back to bed, so I scribbled some key words and slept again. When I checked it in the morning, all it said was ‘Putin dream case.’ I could not remember the dream at all; the words did nothing to jog my memory. I was left with the feeling from a few hours earlier that I had stumbled on to something incredible. I had nothing to show for it. I remarked to a friend recently that was really good at achieving a lot of meaningless things. It was in the context of repeatedly getting into the final stage of PhD interviews and then getting reserve listed. It is so easy to have nothing to show for anything you do. After arriving in Europe a second time, I have been trying to take stock of what the past year was like. Most of what happened feels out of reach, not unlike that lost dream. Having very obviously tied my sense of self-worth to an occupation, I spent a significant part of the year observing my mental health take a freefall. That was interrupted by the slight inconvenience of having to drop everything and run to Delhi to free someone who subsequently showed little to no regard for what it asked of me. Everything I got up to after was uncharacteristic, and a surprise to myself as much as anyone else. But I sit here now in Germany with the feeling of having got to the other side. As you were, one could say, but it is not as I was.

Leaving the Netherlands last year, I did not feel like I was going home. I was being sent away to a country as foreign as the one I was leaving; it contained even less of what I considered home. But I left India with a similarly heavy heart this time. For the first time, I felt like I was leaving something behind. I was thinking about when I would get to return, when my first visit “home” might be. I have always thought of home as people rather than places; this time around, there are more pieces of home at ‘home’. One thing I have always maintained is the possibility that everything I think I know, including about myself, could be wrong. Having made almost an art out of running away, I think I am finally opening up to the idea of running towards. In Giovanni’s Room, Baldwin talks about always having a home to go to, as long as you do not go there. In another book I read recently, I saw a joke that went “ you came to me like a cow, I trembled like a Muslim.” This past year, I lived through events that were unequivocally some of the worst in my life. And when I was on the flight out of this country and into a life that promises to be (and already has been) better than the one I leave behind, I cried real tears. If Bibin’s mom called me today, I do not know how I would answer.

worrying

 

There is always something to worry about. Something to double check, something to put off for later, something to let fester fully aware it will bite you in the ass later. There are worries that feel inescapable, and worries that make you questions whether you are doing it to yourself. There’s little that evidence of things turning out mostly okay does for you in the face of worrying. I’ve mostly stumbled through life with no specific sense of purpose. It seems to have got me into a not unenviable position, but I am still mostly afraid of what lies ahead. I sometimes find it laughable how a life you have to reduce – in description – to grand generalisations has to be lived mostly as a series of immediate crises. While I prepare for my third move in less than a year, the most pressing things on my mind have almost nothing to do with it. The compromise then is to spend every spare moment worrying in the narrative voice of the opening of a documentary on climate change.

I saw a post recently said that something like “from a very early age, it was too late for me.” It speaks to a constant sense of running out of time that I do not think I am alone in feeling. I remember reading in Knight’s book that the Prophet had talked about the Quran being revealed to be read in a solemn sadness. That is the general sense with which I am able to take what comes. This year, I promised myself radical sincerity; I think I have been reasonably faithful to it. My sincerity, I think, comes only with a measure of this solemn sadness. Prospective worrying and retrospective rumination are maybe my only ways of looking at things, enveloped by a pervading but not inescapable sense of sadness. Like I said to a friend once about having loved ones all over the place, what it feels like I am really doing in peppering painful goodbyes here and there just to remind myself what this is all about. In the process of dealing with a series of immediate crises, I have also received a collection of incalculable love.

 

losing

 

I have a little plastic bat and ball. My father has set the toy truck upright. If the ball goes behind me you get four runs, he tells me. If it goes past me without touching the ground you get 6. If it hits anything on the shelves you are out. If it hits the garbage truck you are out. If the bat hits the garbage truck you are out. Once you touch the ball with your bat you can run. If I hit the garbage truck with the ball while you run you are out. The game seems rigged to get me out. I get to ‘bat’ first, he says. I try to get in position like Jayasurya on the TV. My father does not like my stance. He does not know how to put me right because I’m batting left-handed. He makes me switch hands and shows me how to prepare myself for the ball. India loses to Bangladesh. I lose to Uppa. India loses to Sri Lanka. I lose to Uppa. I keep losing to Uppa. He gives me an extra wicket but I lose again. He promises to bowl slowly. I keep losing. Cricket isn’t all that  Uppa has bought me a board with white and black squares that he says if for playing chess. He teaches me that each piece has a place and a role. He lets me start with white as we start playing. I lose the first game, the second, the third, and the fourth. Months and years pass, but every time we play chess, there is only one outcome. He knows everything. Chess is for nerds.

My mother holds a few pages in her hand; she’s cleaning the cupboard. They’ve been torn off a journal from 2000. March 12 10:40pm, it says, Mishal is born. May 6 – Mishal’s first smile. I cannot keep browsing the pages, I’m not sure I want to. Those pages have a recorded a relationship between me and her indescribably different from the one we share now. I try to remember games we have played. Did we play any? I am sure she would have let me win at least once. There might have been some ludo or snakes and ladders here and there. If there are any, they don’t stand out, nothing significant comes to mind. I’m pausing to think about the implications of why even the parent I played with is so gendered. I’m sitting down to watch a movie. She hears the TV play. She comes upstairs, upset I did not tell her about the movie. You’re leaving me, and you don’t even want me to watch this with you. It works, I play it from the start again.

I am watching again the next night; this time, I do ask if she wants to join. Of course she wants to join. I know why I did not ask last night, but it does not need to come up. She’s right, I will probably get to keep leaving anyway.  

 

To Delhi and to Love

 

How do we measure familiarity? By how many days you have known each other? Maybe how much time has been spent in each other’s company? The nature of said company? Little details can have incredible impact on familiarity: liking the same book, finding the same things funny, having irrational hatred for the same condiment. Like everything in my life that defies explanation, I attack this question with all kinds of rationalisations. Some people, however, feel familiar from the moment you meet them, reminding you of the prescient words of a great poet of our age: before you came into my life I missed you so bad.

One of the crueller jokes I think fate plays on me is burdening me with a life and disposition given to constant movement. Most of the people I love live on my phone, and the list just grows all the time. One constant in this random journey of receiving affection from many quarters is how abruptly and painfully I lose the ability to see these people. Sometimes fate is kind enough to give a few months, even a year. Other times, the rug pull comes after just days. One of my favourite most romantic lines I have ever seen is from the movie Casablanca. I will admit to always tearing up watching Humphrey Bogart say “We’ll always have Paris” to an Ingrid Bergman’s character, both fully aware they will never see each other again. I have had to say that many times in my life: fraternally, filially, and fortunately (?) on occasion, even romantically. What I did not expect, however, is to have say we would always have Delhi. I arrived in a state of emergency, against my will, with the intention of wrapping things up as quickly as possible. I leave this city now, four and a half months later, having contained perhaps just as many lifetimes in that duration. I cannot say I have changed my mind about the several awful things I have to say about that city. However, I have lived and felt what it is like to know that among the millions of residents in the national capital are people I love and cherish and know I am loved and cherished by in equal measure.

With little over an hour left for my flight to start boarding, I waited outside Delhi Airport for a man whose phone was unreachable. I stood there knowing I would always regret not having stayed for the goodbye if he got there and did not find me. We got our euphoric two-minute goodbye, he gave me his necklace that he had not taken off in three years. He said he had forgot to bring his wallet in his hurry. I did not know what to do faced with such love. I promised him I would wear that necklace; it is the most meaningful piece of jewellery I have ever received. I don’t understand why it makes me feel sad to feel loved. I teared up inside the airport, and they were not happy tears.

Other familiarities are tougher to talk about. There are words to skirt around. Concepts to be communicated using a language not all are meant to understand. Of the things I take from Delhi is the knowledge that I cannot play NYT Connections, use orange zest in cooking, or even say dammit without a little pang. It is the certainty that some movies, some songs, some drinks, and even some colours, will always remind me of people I might never again have access to. No one bothered to defend Delhi on the same terms that I shit talked it; they all said something to the effect of assuring I would grow to like it anyway and that I would leave it but with a heavy heart. I do not think I grew to like it. I did, however, leave it with a heart much heavier than I imagined would be the case. That I found myself trying to cheer up by telling myself this departure was something I had wished for, and a precursor to a positive step in my life, would be incomprehensible to the man who landed in Delhi in November desperate to get his sister out of jail.

I like to think of life as a collection of people I have met along the way; it is only thing that comes close to giving it a semblance of meaning. I feel burdened by the realisation that it will never be a collection of people I feel like I have loved enough. I can try to convince myself these are all accidents, and not evidence of a tendency to cut and run.  For the past few months of my life, and especially the last few weeks, I hope it is enough to promise I will put a little too much salt in my food and walk out of an underwhelming theatre after 10 minutes every now and then.