The Internet Personified: Where do you go to, my lovely
This stream-of-consciousness post could've been a diary entry tbh
I’m going to India in a few weeks, back for my annual visit, a little earlier than usual this year because an old friend is getting married—she’s young, I mean, but our friendship is over her entire lifetime.
Every time I return to Delhi I wonder which city I’m channelling this time, and which one I’ll meet. I think S’s wedding has taken me back to the Delhi of my teens, I’m in someone’s home—not mine—this is an “old” Delhi home, by which I mean not in Old Delhi where I don’t know anyone, but a home that’s been in the same family since the partition, which makes it old for this new city. The AC is blasting, it’s summer. Or, the quilts are rumpled on the bed and a heater stands in a corner, it’s winter. Whoever this friend is is someone I don’t know very well, I’m not sure why I’m standing in her bedroom while she lolls across the bed, her feet on the wall. She calls out for snacks, a man who’s been working for her family since before she was born, brings us warm things on a tray, cold coffee in the summer, cold coffee in the winter, that being the only way she’ll drink milk. No one thanks him, but he tells the girl on the bed that her mother wants to see her. Or her grandmother, still living in the same house, does. She says fine and can you bring me the cordless. Her mother appears with the phone, she’s a Society Woman, who doesn’t have a profession but seems to be busy all day regardless. She looks at her daughter with disapproval but also with a certain amount of pride, look at my girl lounging like that, look at my girl who doesn’t see the need to please anyone else. She says something about everyone being out and the girl is alone for dinner and what does she want to eat? They run through a few options, the girl chooses, the mother leaves, the phone is tucked into the girl’s chin, against her ear. I am still there, bearing witness.
This isn’t a real memory. I mean, it is and it isn’t. It’s a pastiche of several different evenings in several different homes with several different girls that my brain has knit together. It’s this same girl calling me and I imagine her across her bed, talking to her Labrador—these families always have Labradors—as she talks to me. I don’t think of myself as very interesting to her (to myself I am endlessly fascinating, but I don’t have much to offer girls like this, no cute brothers/friends, no Central Delhi house I can offer up for hangings out or parties, no car and driver at my disposal to take us where we want) so I’m flattered by her interest. My brain has given her a name, Karishma, which is fake, I don’t want to tell you what name my brain has actually given her because that’s a real person I know who I could have been talking to but I know my memory is associating this person with this memory because I can’t think of where else I could be, however the memory is also wrong because I was never close to Karishma in school or college, I never drank cold coffee at her house, never even received a call from her, cordless phone to cordless phone.
Perhaps my brain is throwing up the past because it’s easier than dealing with the present as the world gets more and more fucked up around us. I was reading an article the other day, quite a bad essay so I won’t link it, but there’s one bit that stayed with me. The narrator’s boyfriend asks her which era she’d most like to be born in and she says, without thinking, “This one.” It made me wonder. Objectively, as me, I have a better life now than I would fifty years ago. But it’s a time where we know a lot of things. With great knowledge comes great responsibility. I did not have great knowledge as I sat outside the Gymkhana Club in someone’s car, Robbie Williams playing, the smell of cologne and Pan Parag in the close air conditioned air.
I like my life in Berlin because it seems as though I have been spawned as I am: forty four, carrying lightly all the choices I’ve made in my life that led me here, comfortable at last in my skin and with who I am (mostly.) It’s easy to think as I make new friends, and as my oldest friends here chronologically are only five, not even ready, in human years, to learn how to read (? I don’t know how old you have to be to read) that this was always who I am—social, sociable, goblin-y, a woman of sweeping pronouncements and varied interests. It’s not though, it took me a long time—DECADES—to even know what I liked in books let alone people, and I’m still surprised every now and then when I read something and respond to it different than how I think I will.
Delhi, then, is where I can’t hide from some unflattering aspects of myself, which is not great for the old ego. I don’t miss it, I don’t think. I used to have this old Douglas Adams quote as an email signature: “I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.” I remember this mother of an ex-boyfriend, I had emailed her about something and she wrote back and said, “I just noticed your email signature, it’s so true it made me cry.” It’s giving Robert Frost anyway, another poem that resonates within me.
Some of my (Indian) friends in Berlin call me the Happy Migrant, which makes it sound as though I go skipping down the road with my basket, avoiding the Big Bad Wolf just by accident, but the truth is, I’ve just decided to be happy with where I am. I am here so I will put down my little roots and thrive as best as I can. Life still pummels away at you like a strong wind, setbacks and challenges and hurdles and all the things that seem to increase with every passing year with the delicious surprises coming fewer and farther between but I’m just standing here bloody and unbowed and so on. It’s how I choose an outfit for an occasion, like a costume, to get me through things. I went to this Irish pub quiz on Monday so I wore a green cashmere sweater over a woollen pleated skirt and added a greyhound printed scarf at my throat. I was going for Demure. I was going for I Know Things. (In the end, I found myself disagreeing violently with my team, most of whom I’d never met before, creating a great conflict between the two aspects of myself I call Likes To Win Everything and Likes To Be Liked. Sagittarius/Libra for my fellow astrology nerds. My moon is in Cancer which, if I’m reading that right, means I’d have rather stayed at home and finished my nth rewatch of Downton Abbey.) (Anyway maybe pub quizzes don’t bring out the best sides of my character.) So, what I’m trying to say is, I choose a mood like I choose a costume. I stay cocooned in Think Positive because I have to, because if I don’t then I might have to give in to despair and despair is frightening. Mostly, I’m in a good mood though, I don’t want you to think that I’m doing that scene from a movie where you’re all like hahaha in public and then it cuts to you standing in front of your own bathroom mirror and your face sags and your eyes get really blank.
Suppose it’s not the teenage Delhi I meet but the one where I was a new grown up driving to my first job in Jhandewalan, going through one two three four roundabouts till I reach the one with the round post office and turning left, I can remember it all, Videocon Towers stretching into the sky, the Barista kiosk on the ground floor and my laminated name badge as I hopped into the lift. Going wherever they sent me, so pleased to be asked. Returning home to the other end of Delhi, my own little room that I shared with two friends who are now both in the same continent as me, with whom I have a WhatsApp group, do you remember when we first found the place and we drew lots to see who would get each room? One room had a balcony, the other had an attached bathroom and the third had nothing to say for itself except a lot of cupboards? So we wrote BALCONY and BATHROOM and CUPBOARDS on three pieces of paper and drew lots and I got CUPBOARDS and tried to look like I was okay with this. It was a lot of cupboards though, especially then when I didn’t have as many clothes. Ah, but the flat worked in its own way, how could it not with three very social young women living in it, each with a whole set of friends that we brought forward like in laws. We had the roof, a privilege of a third floor walk up, and I wrote about it in some detail in my first novel, down to the neighbour next door. In fact, it was so long ago, that the fictional neighbour and my real neighbour have sort of become one person, as has the rest of it. (Except the boy. Him I invented, but not his Jor Bagh house which I Frankensteined the details of from various other similar homes.)
No wonder the longer we live the closer we come to being in a state of homesickness all the time. How can you live in the present when the past keeps batting up against your ankles and demanding to be fed? Every year I return to India a little different and every year it takes me a minute to get back in step with all the Meenakshis that exist there. “Oh hello,” I’ll say, when Twelve and Twenty Four both go past me hand-in-hand, “It’s been a while since we’ve talked.”
Listen, if you liked this post or any of my others, you can do one of three things:
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Another thing I wanted to tell you about is that Samit Basu who is an incredible writer and teacher (and also a dear friend which is lucky for me) is starting a writing class, so if you’ve ever wanted to do that, now’s the time.
That’s all I’ve got for you this week! Speak soon.
x
m
I am loving the stream-of-consciousness diary-style posts.
I am surprised I haven’t read any of your books! Getting right to it soon !