The First New One

This is a chronicle of the first few days of my ‘new life’ at the grad school in US. In the intervening summer between my grad school and my undergrad, during long lazy sleepless late night hours of lethargy, I scourged the internet for something of this sort – a commentary on the ‘new experiences’.  The deep-seated sense of curiosity mingled with an urge to gather info – any info – to help me succeed as a student kept me at this intermittently during that time. When I was in Hong Kong, I should have done this. I really makes for an awesome read years later, I realized this AFTER my exchange was over.

SO! I think that’s enough of build-up, and without further ado, I’ll go straight to the point (or as straight as I can).

The journey half-way across the world is overwhelming, emotionally and physically. You practically try to wrap up your life and pack it into two BIG suitcases and just leave everything behind. It’s not a good feeling. Being cooped up in a cramped space for around 20 hours doesn’t help either. Despite having done this before (while going to Hong Kong <HK from this point on>), I still was hit hard. Perhaps, the reason for it was two fold – when I was headed to HK, I had a return ticket – I knew when I was going to be back Home. Now <ahh.. I have no clue as to how long before I board a flight heading back home. An year? An year and a half? Your guess is as good as mine>. Secondly, it occupied a lot less brain space – then I was worried (worried is too heavy a word, I’d say concerned) about food and loneliness. On this journey, concerns about food and loneliness were just gift wrapped in cute little packages and handed to me after the glorious, humongous, mind blowing present of financial and educational worry were delivered to me.

Anyways, after 20+ glorious hours of incredible flights and 10 hours of pleasant layovers, which included a tiny flight delay of 3 hours, I landed in qwerty – the city which houses THE uni – the one I’d been crazy after since the last 2 years. I was here finally. The moment had arrived. I was there, finally. All the mundane and mind-numbing paperwork of visa documentation, etc etc was forgotten in a jiffy.

All I wanted to do now was to take THE uni by storm – announce the arrival of awesomeness from India. But alas, nothings that easy. First few days you are in your Honeymoon phase and you’re lost. Wait – did I talk about the phases yet? I haven’t, have I? Excuse the diversion, but I must tell you this.

Soooo….. I have this theory. Sorta kinda conclusions drawn from observations and a bit of extension in the form of hypothesis. In a new place, there are five distinct stages uptill <relatively> peaceful steady state. They are The Crush, The Affair, The Honeymoon, The Fight and The Reconciliation. It all begins online, you discover Her. The one you want. THE university. You smile and stalk her on the internet. By the end of the week, you know her biography by heart. Location, size, application deadline, fee structure et al. The courting begins. You talk to friends of friends who study there. You check out the pictures of the campus online. The webpage of the university slowly creeps up the list of ‘Most Visited’ in your Chrome. At this stage, you are stalking several other universities as well. You have an eye on all of them. She sends the most alluring signals – the scale of the research, the awesome faculty and things like that. You prepare to blow her off her feet – your Statement of Purpose. That particular document would have you look like a philanthropic Spock- dedicated to science, knowledge and benefit of humankind; devoid of feelings like greed, apathy or even the ability to feel tired. Finally you go down on one knee and apply – to all you were stalking. After a brief interlude the results are out. Turns out, several of these universities are interested in you as well. Here it gets exciting and tense. You finally pick one and convince yourself that she’s the best.

Now begins The Affair. You realize she is high maintenance and demanding. You are whipped. You spend months running around getting stuff done for her. Forms, interviews, loans what not. You start to have doubts creeping in. Is she worth it? But you stodgily keep at it. Your friends, who had different taste, are having fun <apparently> Facebook would have you believe so. Their choice is giving them rewards (salary) already. Their statuses pour in. You keep reminding yourself that this is what you wanted, that this university is the one for you. :-/ But all is not bad. She might be demanding, but she gives you Hope. You see people are happy with her <again courtesy fb>. Starry eyed, you keep at it. And keep checking off days till your rendezvous with her. And then comes the aforementioned enjoyable journey.

You get there and The Honeymoon begins. She is different from what you expected, but good different. Many things are better than back home – your new apartment would make your hostel mates chew their hearts out, the campus is stunning, the place is less crowded etc. You are lost and stupid <trying asking for directions and following them>. You survive the first week using GPS and eating Top Ramen. You double up a ketchup bottle as a pillow, but you somehow survive the first week. You haven’t unpacked your stuff. Looking for things from undies to your Passport is a task which takes time. Every moment is a new discovery. You meet new people, have a hard time remembering all those names but you pull through. There are signs that the road isn’t as smooth as it appears to be right now. You notice the difference between Her and your ex. You realize that your ex wasn’t that bad, given the circumstances she functioned in and the kind of funding she had. Also you notice things like this: everything’s BIG, the flight kindof took you up the magical beanstalk of the Jack and the beanstalk fame. The freeways, the people, the shopping areas, the cars, the girls. <yeah one piece of advice, if you are five feet six inches tall, leave yourself self-respect home. People here are tall. It doesn’t help if one of the hottest chicks you meet in the first few days is good 6 inches taller than you and still wears 4 inch heels. IT. FEELS. BAD. You feel minuscule.> Another thing: it seems you walked into a mirror. Everything is done in the opposite directions. Some are easy to notice – cars. Others are much more subtle – if you are walking and another person’s coming towards you, you step to the right hand side to give them passage.

The lack of connectivity bugs you. No laptop or even a phone for first couple of days. The frustration of not having a laptop gets to you pretty fast. You still manage to upload 20 pictures to fb in the Album titled ‘My New Life’. But you don’t care, nothing can stop you from smiling. This lasts for a fortnight, max 20 days.

Then you have The Fight. You know her pretty darn well to get by now. She isn’t as awesome as you thought she was initially. You know people but you have no friends. Finally the dam breaks and you start missing people back home. Since the moment you said goodbye, turned on your heels and wheeled the baggage into the airport, you knew this would happen. That is a strange kind of loneliness. It seems to feed off the darkness. Its okay in the daytime. As dusk turns to night, you shudder. There’s so much to tell but no one to tell to. Your new roommate is a nice person but he isn’t your best friend. You find a strange orange mushroom growing in the grass you’re excited beyond measure and when show it to your roommate he just shrugs. Your heart sinks. That’s when it happens. You realize the meaning of loneliness. Then you appreciate what a miracle modern technology is. You talk to your best friend on Skype – in real time. Sitting halfway across the world, you recognize the meaningful smile. You heart explodes with joy, but it is short-lived. You have to return to the cavern of the present and the loneliness. You still can’t grasp how your entire past life has been reduced to a few photographs on your desk.

Slowly, you try to find peace. You accept that things will never be the same as back home. You buckle down and admit that you are angry at Her because of no reason. Its not her fault that you are lonely. You get back your curiosity towards her, but this time it isn’t as acrid and intense. Its more of a slow, low flame. You start liking the city better because of tiny things – the radio stations play classic rock all day, the restaurant played your favorite rock song the other day, the people in your department are much more helpful than you thought they would be. You like the fact that you have a couch in your room and that there’s a grocery store a couple of blocks away. You start becoming more acquainted to your roommates. A clear sign of that is when you start abusing them and they abuse you back and you all laugh. You feel a little more settled, but still like an infant. The dusk becomes less scary. That probably marks the end of the beginning..... 

Gosh, I talked a lot this time, didn’t I. I think I should probably get going, now that I have yapped quite a lot. I should get back to the <sigh> assignment due tomorrow.


DISCLAIMER: Please appreciate the fact that I have written the analogy in a humorous way. No offence or disrespect intended to anyone.  

The Dry Leaf

What is that which gives you the sense of belonging? What makes you identify with your ‘hometown’?

I wish to reach out to any person who has ever spent an extended amount of time away from their ‘home’ – the place where they grew up. As an individual who came to university and in late teenage lived ‘away’ for the first time and sees the end of this phase staring at him in his face, this is an attempt to enunciate certain feelings. The problem is that my ability to express is severely inadequate. It is hard to put such things into words. Please bear with me, for this means a lot.

I have spent a good part of the last three-and-half years bragging about my hometown to anyone who would raise the topic. The mere mention of the name has always made my chest swell with pride and an inadvertent smile to cross my lips. Anyone from my city automatically became an ‘ally’. It was – no is, IS, ­the best city in the whole wide world – a blessed city, a tiny little piece of heaven. It is a simple concept – the foundation of so many good memories made it impossible to feel any other way.

I make the journey back ‘home’ a couple of times every semester. As I leave behind the city where I live now, I reach out the closet people and share with them my joy of heading back. I do it every single time – compulsively. The homecoming is ecstatic and euphoric. The smile is and easy and fresh – like a mountainous brook. I am going ‘home’ – to family, memories, good food and oh! the blessed evening breeze. I reach ‘home’ and as the initial euphoria recedes, a strange realization dawns – there is something different about how I feel. Being ‘home’ is supposed to make you happy naturally, without you even noticing – like ice cream or candyfloss. Now, there is a separate undercurrent, a strange unease.

On the surface, everything is hunky-dory. I walk into ‘my room’; it exudes a warm becalming aura. I look around, and think everything is as I left it - almost. I walk upto my old closet and open it, expecting it to be full of my clothes. A complete mental picture of what thing lies where. I jump back horrified. The closet if full of my dad’s files and notes. The realization dawns that most of my stuff is now in the hostel, the rest had been moved ages ago to a smaller closet. Then the discerning realization – I knew my stuff was moved, but I had chosen to forget it……

….. I am looking for a pen; I wander into my old ‘room’ and poke my hand into a bowl by the bedside. I kept pens there, back when I ‘lived’ here. Nothing but dust. Again, the chocking realizations that I knew pens are no longer kept here.

A strange sense of desperation starts creeping in. The uneasy feelings seem to seep from below the doors, the cracks in the windows like a noxious gas, terrorizing, asphyxiating, driving me crazy. I look for things that make me feel I ‘belong’.  I cling onto some remnants. The house secrets – where to look for the cookies, for spare change etc, the smell of the incense my mother burns. I resign to the fact that I register small changes every time I come home, but I choose to forget them when I am at the hostel, restoring the memories to the ‘original, pristine’ state.

A friend calls – I go out to meet him. He asks me to meet him at a certain eating joint. Instantly, I am lost. Where is it exactly? I drift along the road knowing that I am nearby the place. Finally, slowly, I turn to a passerby and ask for directions – in my ‘own’ city. Numbness creeps in. Listen-nod-walk. Brain churning – I have been reduced to a tourist in my ‘own’ city. Just to add to the miserable feeling, someone asks me for directions. I mumble – I don’t know - hang my head and walk.

As I return home, the things I used to give myself a feeling of belonging earlier in the day feel alien in my head. I almost feel like an intruder. Knowing details that I shouldn’t know about the house – ‘my home’. Intimacy lies in the detail. The detail has been lost on me. The image has been so fogged that it is barely recognizable. My ‘home town’ is a phantom city now – its exits only in my head – as a mirage, as a fragile beautiful poignant memory. The reality is overwhelmingly different and obtrusively smashes through my conscience. I am trapped in a time vortex. The memories drag me down and my fear pulls me up. I hang in balance – my mind taking the worst brunt of the overwhelming realizations. There I stay – as Rushdie put it- knocked in the middle – neither able to let go nor to rewind time.

I amble out for an evening stroll – and the stunning evening breeze blows across my path a dry, fragile, wrinkled but beautiful leaf.

 It just makes me smile and well up…..