The Internet Personified: You Can't Go Home Again

New location, same old newsletter

Feb 15, 2024

My perfect little goslings,

It’s been a long time since I sent you these missives. I took a break in January. I needed the time to just be, not that these newsletters are such arduous tasks, but this is the longest I’ve spent without doing any writing at all—I haven’t written, only very sporadically in my journal—and it’s been both important and useful to me, while I figure out what I’m thinking and feeling. Besides which I’ve been on holiday, and continue to be, and life on holiday means not having to think about putting pen to paper, so to speak. I spoke at a girl’s college about writing, and I wrote an op-ed for the Times of India, but mostly I’ve been relaxing. Going out, eating lots of food, watching TV and so on.

The first part of this is from my first week in Delhi, we’ve moved since then to Kochi where I am currently. From here we go on a loop—Bangalore, Hampi, Goa—before heading back to Delhi and then into Uttar Pradesh, K wants to check out Ayodhya, I want to see Lucknow since I’m there anyway, and we (my mum, K and I) are all going to Varanasi together as well. Then K leaves (and reunites with the cats) (we have a very nice sitter who sends us regular updates, don’t worry), and I stay on for a few more weeks mainly in Delhi, with one small weekend in Hyderabad to visit my grandmother on my mother’s side.

Delhi

I have come back to Ram Mandir openings and saffron flags raised high on every available electric pole. In Nizamuddin East, where a lot of my friends live, I don’t see them so much, but in my mother’s mixed income neighbourhood it’s almost triumphant. It is triumphant, come to think of it. These are people who have been somehow seduced into the idea that they’re a prosecuted majority, not seeing the contradiction in that sentence. They buy flags with an angry Hanuman on it, war-like, scowling. In my youth, the only Hanuman depiction I saw was one of him kneeling, splitting open his chest to show Ram and Sita in his heart. Hanuman was the faithful servant, the entourage, the flag bearer. Now his monkey jaw is out of proportion with his thick neck, his eyes in a permanent glare, his mouth turned downwards.

“My Hanuman has attitude, not aggression. He is powerful, not oppressive. But that’s the problem with art. There is no limit to interpretation,” the artist said.

Since I was last in Delhi, the G20 summit happened as well. We landed very late in the night on Republic Day and were greeted with tricolour lights everywhere, wrapped around street lights on the way to the highway, blinking at us in the distance. Everything still looked a little polished, even though the summit was last September. The MCD removed stray dogs, and so they’re fewer on Delhi roads, no loping figures in the distance, only the occasional one or two old fat ones sunning themselves in little patches. It wasn’t just dogs though—the government also saw fit to hide away people. And so, Delhi seems a little emptier, not something you’d immediately notice, but a flicker at the back of your mind: what’s wrong with this picture?

It’s the first time I’ve been away for so long, and although I was determined that I would be the same person and Delhi would be the same city, distance has made us both view each other with new eyes.

I did a trip to Sarojini Nagar while I was there. This time though, I went with a clear goal in mind. Normally, I’m just shopping, wandering about, picking up (too many) things for a wardrobe refresh. This time though, Berlin was active at the back of my mind. I was thinking about my small bedroom, my one skinny closet (which I shared with K), my clothing rack where I hang my dresses (already overloaded.) I was thinking that in Berlin, the clothes I miss are those for the between seasons—not summer or winter, but the cold of spring and of fall. Cotton dresses don’t go very far, every year I take out all my summer clothes and swap out my winter wear (we have a storage area in the basement) and every year I’ve been there, I only wind up wearing about a fourth of them. So I shopped in Delhi, thinking about my life away, a mustard polo neck, a woolen skirt, a sleeveless sweater, some long tops, some silky shirts, all designed to be worn over layers. It was a sort of dissonance, this shopping with one eye on the time I would wear these clothes. I picked up a flannel dress and thought, not of wearing it to my next Delhi houseparty, but how it would look over tights and under a sweater, walking down the street towards my favourite local bar. Would I be snug and warm and yet stylish? It wasn’t something I’d ever considered before in Sarojini Nagar, and yet that’s why my mum and I chose the last week of January to go there, so the early spring clothes they put out (Sarojini works with an export surplus model, clothes designed for foreign weather, goes out seasonally) because now, if I do another trip, there’s a chance I won’t be able to wear everything I buy when I’m back.

I think about Berlin frequently. I think it’s my way of putting off the grief of parting once more, to remind myself that I like my life there. I see beloved friends, my parents etc and I imagine waking up in the morning in our flat in Berlin, and how I pad from the bed to the kitchen, cats around my ankles to make my coffee and the grey sky and the blank trees that I’ll be able to see outside my window. Although by the time I return, it will be the beginning of spring, so the first buds will be on the trees, everything returning to life once more, even if we do get a few more snow days until May. I think I think about Berlin so much because otherwise it drifts away. I haven’t lived abroad for so long that it’s become normal to leave, India is more a habit for me than Berlin ever will be. Which is why it’s important to keep it in mind. Does this make sense to anyone else? Even writing it feels so fuzzy. Do I miss being there while I’m here? No. But it’s like having a new lover, a lover you really like and who you enjoy being with, and you’ve just returned to your old lover and all the things you liked about this one are still relevant, especially since you’re only spending two months with your old flame. Two months is a honeymoon, not a lifestyle.

But leaving has made me see things with a refresh as well. I’m sure you’re all very woke (in the true sense of the word, not pejorative) and aware and everything, but I, I tend towards laziness in everything, even thought. A callus forms around me, and I’m no longer able to care about things that your average thinking feeling person should care about. How Modi’s government is making everyone who doesn’t agree with them feel unsafe and insecure even within their own country. How online hate has become so casual and expected that people are finding it super easy to hate offline as well, even when they’re not behind a computer screen. How some things—like pollution for example—have become so baked in to our expectations of our city that we just endure it, run air purifiers and say with a sigh, “Oh yes, it’s pollution season.” We have low hopes of our elected government, just don’t kill people seems to be the bar, so everything else is, if not okay, then at least endurable.

On the one hand, I’m on holiday like an NRI and enjoying myself hugely, on the other, I’m seeing all these other things in person for the first time in a year, so there’s all that too.

Kochi

From still-cold Delhi, we took a flight to humid Kochi. The first thing I noticed was my hair. I mean, not my actual hair, but MY HAIR on EVERYONE ELSE’S HEAD. I learned, in my last few years in Germany, that I have a generic ambiguous sort of face. I could be from anywhere—I get South American a lot, usually Brazil or Venezuela, once Ecuador. I got Egyptian once. Spanish once or twice. I put this down to my hair, which grows big and defiant and curly, challenging everyone’s views of what “Indian” must look like. In a group of South Asians, I look South Asian, but take me without context and I am just generically “south of here.” This happens to a lot of South Asians, it isn’t just me, so I’m not sure what “Indian” is supposed to look like stereotypically, but apparently not like us.

Anyway, my hair is a strange inheritance, a mix of genes from both sides. I see it on my aunts on my father’s side, and I see it in old photos of my dead grandfather on my mother’s side. It starts out a little straight, moves into waves and then performs a final pirouette with spiral curls at the ends. It’s so thick that it gets matted, and even thicker than that, I have to part layers of hair to find the matted parts, hiding like little gnomes. It’s so dense that washing my hair in cold weather takes a full day if I want to let it dry naturally, or an hour of dedicated blow drying (I prop up a book and read while I’m doing it.) I don’t trust any hairdressers in Berlin with it, so a trip back to India usually means a trip to Martina (of Martina Wu’s salon in Delhi) (pro tip: she’s very busy and you want only her to cut your hair so book your appointment well in advance) who cuts it stylish and short for me not to bother about it for another year. (Also it grows very fast like a tropical plant.) If you were to draw a picture of me, basically, you’d get away with doing a stick figure and adding a black scribble of hair on either side and most people would guess who I was.

After years of loathing, I’ve come to a relationship with my curls, thanks in part to Martina who has been cutting my hair since I was in my twenties, but also to the Curly Girl Method, and using chemical free products and washing only with conditioner and blah di blah, so I’m good now standing in a room full of silky straight haired people without throwing them glances of envy (okay, maybe one glance). In Kerala though, my hair is normal, it’s everywhere, braided tightly into schoolgirl plaits, loose and windy on the back of bike, under a helmet, under a dupatta, at restaurants, frizzy in some cases, cared for in others.

Kochi has never been home-home, not like Delhi. Neither has Hyderabad. But these two places exist in an almost-home area, they’re not mine, but the cities are part of my blood. Things are familiar and yet things are very different from what I’m used to. After the harshness of North India, Kochi is verdant, a steam bath of a town, gentle murmurs, a language I don’t speak and so, sounds soothing. I resented both these places when I was a teenager and being dragged there on summer holidays. Like all teenagers, I wanted to fit in, to belong. To be taken to an alien place, so different from my friends’ lives, it felt like I was being marked in some way. I stayed stubbornly Delhi, lower lip out, book to my face. But even I couldn’t sulk all summer, so I participated, reluctantly at first but then with more feeling. I was alone then, an outsider even amongst my cousins, one of the great sorrows of being an only child is that no one else shares your exact life experience. So here, in Kochi, in Hyderabad, I was the Delhi-returned cousin, in Delhi I was the “South Indian” who ate idly-dosa for breakfast. I crafted my own identity in the end, holding myself apart, choosing English as the only language I would speak, picking through likes and dislikes with no grey areas. I see a lot more of myself, in fact, in younger generations, Gen Z is full of mixed-culture only children, Gen Alpha even more so. I turned to my friends the other day in Delhi—a Bengali and a Malayali who were lamenting their daughters not speaking much Hindi and I said, “They’re me! Your daughters are me!” (That said, I had a lot of Hindi speaking friends growing up thanks to the mixture of people who lived then where we lived and the particular “colony friend” that was such a thing in the 80s and 90s, and now seems to be extinct.) (And those preteen Hindi speaking friends are probably the reason I know Hindi at all, because otherwise it was just at school and I would’ve fallen out of practice.) (My friends were like, “oh right” and returned to their conversation but it was an epiphany for myself anyway.)

If Bangalore is Beantown, Kochi should be Fishtown

I feel closer to Kochi now than I did when I was younger. I’m not so prickly any more, that’s probably a start. I’ve spent a lot of time here, in my dad’s flat, post moving. Every time I came back to India on a visa run, I came here for a week or so, sometimes with K, sometimes without. It’s more familiar now than it ever has been and these new memories are mixing with the old. I’m even picking up a little Malayalam (five words on last count!) because I’m not resistant to it any more. (Plus since I started learning German, other languages are feeling less daunting.)

Still though, when anyone asks me where I’m from, I say, “Delhi.” It’s just the way it is.

Varkala

I am ashamed to admit that it was white people in Germany who first put me on to Varkala. “Ker-ahla is so beautiful,” they’d say, and I’d smile smugly, and then, “We were in Varkala.” Which is when my face would become blank and I’d be puzzled and also a little competitive, because what was this Varkala and why did we never go?

It finally took my friend Yamuna (hi Yamuna!) to mention it on a cold Berlin night for me to consider it seriously. “Shall we go to Varkala?” I texted my dad, and we were on.

If you have plenty of time (or at least 10-12 hours) to make your journey, I’d highly recommend train travel. Especially in South India, where they feed you constantly, and the landscape is so lovely and green outside. The two of us—me and K—have been train travel advocates from the beginning of our relationship, but one long holiday planned foolishly in North India in January (fog season, delays), killed my enthusiasm a bit. Now though, since we’re doing longer holidays through India again, we’re catching a train whenever the journey is under 24 hours, K is all for trying longer ones but I fear my patience will run out. Kochi to Varkala isn’t very long, only 3.5 hours, and to get there we stopped in Trivandrum for the night where my dad was speaking at a literature festival and we went to the evening party by the beach which was also nice.

View from the North Cliff. See the teeny people on the beach below?

But Varkala was gorgeous and dramatic, a cliff drop to the beach, so if you’re swimming and you look back you see these high walls of stone, people looking down at you. It’s very popular with older foreign tourists coming there for ayurveda and what not, so not a particularly indolent party vibe, not like Goa. The home stay we were at (Soul Stay, basic but lovely, can recommend) had yoga classes every morning that were full. The food was okay, Indian food dumbed down for tourists, but you can’t have everything. We felt very healthy with our walks down to the beach (and to my dad’s hotel, ten minutes away) and our early nights.

Oh, AND! We took a kayaking tour of the mangroves and that was excellent. I felt like an explorer, but my arms were killing me by the end, especially my elbow joints which is where I’m developing my late in life pains, not my knees, which is a mixed blessing. I can walk a lot but I can’t carry anything in my arms so I have to sling things across my shoulders which leads to painful knots between my shoulder blades. But it was truly an incredible tour and has raised my interest in kayaking which is also something I can do in Berlin on the Spree. You must try it. (Go to Aqua Heaven, which was recommended to us by someone at our home stay and was v nice. Ask for Nand Kumar/Kishore.)

Chalo, I must go. Lunch is being prepared—fried sardines and rasam and thoran— little chopped up veggies tossed in coconut—and I have to roll away from my desk and walk a few steps to the dining room. What a life, eh? What. A. Life.

Currently watching: In honour of Valentine’s Day yesterday, I decided to stream that K Jo blockbuster: Rocky Aur Rani Ki Prem Kahanii, and K sat down with me as well. I was fully prepared to turn it off if it got too much, but to my surprise (pleasant), it’s actually really good? It leans into its OTT nature, lots of satire about old Bollywood films and whoever did the subtitles on Amazon Prime spelled out Rocky’s Delhiboy English with such flair (meanz, ajjucated etc) that we cracked up several times. Plus the central love story: can an intellectual Bengali woman (super stereotyped Bengali family) fall in love with a crass Punjabi man (also super stereotyped) was actually believable. I mean, at first she just wants to sleep with him because lust, but over time she catches feelings and I… kinda get it? I think you should give it a whirl if you’ve been avoiding it.

Advice: Have you been to Hampi and can you suggest a good tour guide operation because we’re only there for two days and want to see ALLLLLL of it.

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