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.