Between home and the world

Between home and the world

To leave one’s home voluntarily for another place is a choice pregnant with twin sentiments: hope and despair. Hope that a better future awaits. From women deceived and trafficked across the world to high-skilled immigrants, a sliver of (in small quantities) promise animates many such decisions to move. But more varied in its contents of expression is the despair that follows. This is especially so if the journey from home has no return ticket — be it wives from south Indian villages who travel with their husbands to the urban wilderness of Delhi or Mumbai, or husbands who spend their married lives as lonesome men working in the Gulf, or young students who leave the comfort of their homes for the sprawling (spread out over a large area in an untidy or irregular way.) university campuses of America or Australia. To each of them, the accompanying despair at first arises not just from physical dislocation but also from the very experience of being awash in new vocabularies, inflections, and sounds. What is common to all, at first, is a sense of breathlessness. Before long, as many an immigrant will testify, this breathlessness gives way to an exhaustion from sustained efforts to decipher (succeed in understanding, interpreting, or identifying (something).) the unrelenting onslaught of implicit codes and hieroglyphics (enigmatic or incomprehensible symbols or writing.) that mark any foreign culture.

Foreign to the familiar

But eventually, the foreign becomes familiar, a metamorphosis of the mind under way. The vividness of what was once home is now replaced by an inchoate (just begun and so not fully formed or developed) swirl. The memory of what once seemed self-evident and commonplace is now drowned in the maelstrom (a situation or state of confused movement or violent turmoil.) of the hurly-burly of this new life. Add to this one’s family and friends who have stayed behind and who are often sensitive only to visible changes — one grows tall, puts on weight, strong jawlines become double chins, baldness and grey arrive, unexpectedly, like thieves in the afternoon. Those ostensibly close to oneself predictably fail to notice the imperceptible changes within. These inner shifts of sentiment and taste now shroud the self in new garbs and are rarely noticed, often, even by oneself. Yet they accrete (grow by accumulation or coalescence.), patiently, unobtrusively, and with the authority of a despot.

From Edward Said’s autobiography (Out of Place) to the allegorical (constituting or containing allegory.) fantasies of lonely migrants in the sun-baked Arabian Gulf in Binyamin’s Aadu Jeevitham (translated as Goat Days), it is no surprise that writers have mined this sense of dislocation. It is a complex of experiences that lends itself easily to subtleties, greyness, and open-ended questions. As Jhumpa Lahiri writes in The Namesake, her protagonist discovers that her foreignness was “a parenthesis in what had once been an ordinary life.” And echoing many other immigrant writing, Lahiri’s heroine discovers that her “previous life has vanished, [and was] replaced by something more complicated and demanding.” This sentiment that describes the immigrant experience as a form of acquiescence to the strange, as a negotiation with the complex, has a certain narrative cohesiveness and intuitive appeal.

What is less explored is the experience of those who feel like outsiders on returning home. In parts, there is an ever-present suspicion that it is an impostor who has returned. The one who left home has been irretrievably (in a way that cannot be retrieved or put right.) lost, while the one who has returned is an altered version — a simulacrum (an unsatisfactory imitation.) with ostensibly real feelings. Since Odysseus made his journey back home in Homer’s Odyssey, every returnee has had to jump through various hoops to prove that he is indeed who he claims he is. For Homer, unlike modern authors, it was not just nostalgia for home that was the animating principle, but also nostalgia for the lost self of the past. It is this effort to excavate the archaeologies of one’s forgotten selves that prods Odysseus to do various jobs to prove himself as the very same who left Ithaca.

Foreignness at home

Narratively, this sense of foreignness is harder to describe and not given to easy summaries. Whereas the experience of strangeness in foreign lands lends itself easily to comedy or pathos (a quality that evokes pity or sadness.), the converse — foreignness at home — is harder to describe without being contrived (created or arranged in a way) . In fact, there is a whiff (a trace or hint of something bad, menacing, or exciting.) of treason when declaring that one’s loyalty to home as a place, as a geography circumscribed by the present, has now changed to something more ephemeral and yet just as vivid: a loyalty to the idea of home. This idea of home doesn’t obviously exist. In fact, this idea of home that many non-residents carry within themselves of home is an artifice, a lacquer house of memory and melancholy from separation. Upon contact with the fires of reality, this carefully architected menagerie (a strange or diverse collection of people or things.) of memories goes up in flames.

All around us, as India grows more interconnected, as Indians step out of their homes in search of jobs and prosperity, there ineluctably (unavoidably) follows the spectre of dislocation, nostalgia, and return. Predictably, political movements increasingly speak in a vocabulary where ‘home’, ‘purity’, and the urgencies of nativist reactionaries figure more urgently. But forgotten amidst all the bluster of politics and idealisation of home in our media and films is also a growing group of Indians who have returned, who suspect they are foreigners in their own homes.