Spectate

 

Someone told me recently about a fun activity they were about to do. I remarked that I had just seen it happen in a movie the previous day. They responded that they were living life while I was watching it. I think they felt the weight of their words immediately because the conversation switched instantly. But they are right. Life is passing me by. I am trying to cling on to a sense that I too am living, primarily by reading and watching movies. I am, at some level, trying to live vicariously through art. It is my way to see the world, my way to imagine a life less miserable, my way to imagine happiness. Not that all my happiness is imagined. There is a line that United fans put on their flags and banners: “If I had not seen such riches I could live with being poor”. That is how this year has felt. A glimpse, nay even a taste, of happiness that was offered to me, only to have it taken away with no path to recover it.

For half a year – but especially in the past month – I have been waiting for the day I can just home, take a shower and kick back with a cup of tea. Go ‘home’, here, barely exists outside the world of ideas. When I do imagine it, however, I am thinking of my room in the Hague. The only place I have inhabited that I also attempted to populate with a semblance of personality. There was even a gavel I meant to bring there; it did not arrive in time before the last time I left India. A minor one in a string of unfulfilled desires I left that country with. Everything I came to love in my time there has become indefinitely inaccessible. I cannot step out onto the canal and read a book again. There is no filmhouse that will show Donald Sutherland’s best works when he dies. I cannot so much as enjoy a walk without being fully aware of my surroundings and worrying about being poisoned by the air breathe. Worst of all, I do not even get to not feel like an outsider; that might have made some of this mean something.  

Preserve

 

What merits expression? The only person who used to read these with any sort of regularity and tell me about it was my sister. Now they are in jail. Nothing I do seems to be enough to get them out in post-rule-of-law India. It has always been beyond me what motivates them to consistently put themselves in harm’s way fully aware that this is state is by design hostile to people like them.

What is the point of writing anything at all? I have spent most of this year looking for something to look forward to. The closest I have got is looking forward to Wafi getting out of jail; they were already not in jail to begin with. Even prospective joy is about restoring status quo ante, not improvement in any real sense. On the contrary, even after they are out, things will not be as they are before. Like I’ve said in previous blogs, the wrong kinds of documents will now follow them, and follow them for a long time.

Running around trying to find empathy in a city predisposed to rudeness and hostility is not how I expected to be ending this year. That while breathing poison. If I were to take stock of this year, if 2024 me were to meet 2025 me, I think he would shoot me. In all honesty, I would not be disinclined to make sure he aimed at my temple.

I watched ‘The 400 Blows’ Today. The movie is an incredibly sincere look at the alienating experience of childhood, an experience exacerbated by the wanton disregard with which every adult Antoine interacts with treats him. It reminded me – apart from my own childhood – of reading Catcher in the Rye. It also reminded me of The Holdovers, a movie I watched on Christmas Eve a couple of years ago (and will probably do so again this year). There’s a line that has continued to follow me: “You can’t even dream a whole dream, can you?” I don’t think I can. There is hardly a worse feeling than articulating a desire and never getting it. It is safer not to want, not to hope, to accept that you’re someone life happens to, and try not to militate against it at the expense of your well-being. But Wafi is not like that; they refuse to take wrongs sitting down. Freezing for a few weeks in the hard prison floors is a price they are prepared to pay. They turn the wheels of history; I might be lucky enough to read about it one day. Or luckier still, 2024 me might be waiting around the corner.  

Rain

 

I read a few weeks ago about this plot to engineer rain in Delhi to reduce level of air pollution. It made me think of the phrase about allowing yourself to feel the rain on your skin. The idea is about letting your guard down – allowing yourself to simply exist in nature without trying to protect yourself from it. What if the rain is engineered? When I step out it is not rain that envelops me but a scary mix of smoke and dust. I am preoccupied with covering as much of my skin as is conceivable. The rain they were speaking of is from a different world.

I read another quote from Adorno today, one to the effect of saying that in many of our lives, the only true moment of freedom (or happiness) is the moment of realisation that freedom (or happiness) is not our lot. That one instant of liberation, of being able to breathe out without the unbearable weight of hope, is all most people can expect. “Theirs but to do and die”. We read books and we watch movies and we hear stories about lives more fantastic, peaceful, and dignified than ours, fully aware that it does not behove us to even dream of such chance. An incredible characteristic I see of people in Delhi is that everyone knows their place. Everyone has their own share of people they will suffer disrespect from, and they will dole it out to. I think that is why everyone is so willing to take it; there is always someone below them to perpetuate the cycle of abuse. As Ambedkar said, “the class consists of the lower and lowerer” and the lower cannot combine with the lowerer for fear of losing his ‘high’ position.  

at home

 

“It is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home” – Theodor Adorno

“He smiled, "Why, you will go home and then you will find that home is not home anymore. Then you will really be in trouble. As long as you stay here, you can always think: One day I will go home." He played with my thumb and grinned.

"Beautiful logic," I said. "You mean I have a home to go to as long as I don't go there?"”– Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin

These lines have little to do with each other. They approach the idea of home from very different contexts. Adorno is demanding at interrogation of the comfort and security of having one’s own home, and how it comes at the expense of the privation of many others. In Giovanni’s room, the idea of a home that exists only as long you do not go there is expressed with respect to someone who has been living on the wrong side of the Atlantic for long enough that any ‘home’ he returns to will not be what he left. He remains a perpetual outsider in France and will return to America having lost the ability to call it home.

My father left Kerala over thirty years ago. Having spent his formative years in the state and taken pains to stay connected to his roots all this while, he remains ‘of Kerala’ even in 2025. I still think that when he does return, he will return to a home that is not really his. However, unlike Baldwin’s protagonist, it will remain his home even after he returns. My sisters and I grew up away from this ‘home’. In 2010, when we had a housewarming for the house my parents had built in Kerala, we had a home in a country we had never lived in, and would not for another decade. I cannot internalize how that country, that village, and that real and tangible piece of immovable property is something I must call home. The characters I refer to above lose their ‘home’ because they have removed themselves from it at a real point in history. My home is fiction; it is constructed. It is a stone’s throw away from where my father went to school, and plane ticket and visa barriers away from where I did. Neighbours and relatives know Mujib’s son; they have seen me posted on his Facebook. In a sense significantly more superficial than Adorno meant, I am naturally not at home in my home.

We have each chosen to cope with in wildly different ways. I try to run away. A undergraduate degree in the state farthest from Kerala, a master degree in another continent, and repeated attempts since to remove myself from these ‘roots’. One sister who has embraced this country like they have never known anything else. Another who, as she comes of age, also angles to make a home of her own elsewhere. Our stories are not unique, and in a world where displacement is mostly involuntary, hardly tragic. I know, at least, where to point fingers for being raised as part of a generation that do not have a place to be ‘from’. My little trick to “where are you from?” is to start the response with “my parents are from…” and hope it conveys that I still feel the Arabian Sea separating me from ‘home.’