Arnab Guha is a NRIOL featured columnist. To read about Arnab Guha, please Know more.
"Disorientation is loss of the East. ... The east orients. ... The language says so, and you should never argue with the language."
-- Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999).
Hovering over Calcutta in a 747, the dusty, grimy metropolis with half the population of Canada looks as smooth and calm as a screen saver floating in another world separated by a high-tech, low-res screen. The rough edges that make and mark this pitted, potted city are relegated to the detached and indifferent domain of the virtual. Gin and tonic in hand, and Sonny Boy Williamson in my padded, cyborg ears, I find it hard to relate to the million minute realities that were my own for so many years in that city, at street level.
I forget the power-cuts, the sooty makeshift kitchens in landings between flights of stairs and behind doors, the lime flaking off the walls. The slow whirring of the ceiling fans in the heat, the thousand alleyways, puddles and drains. The intricate maze of bends and curves, of angles and circles and tea-stalls that one must navigate each and every day in the sprawling city of my birth.
Altitude has airbrushed everything into smoothness.
... The airplane's porthole, like a computer screen, allows me a gracious scan of India's former imperial capital, lying in a neat pattern of gray and lush green by an ancient scoliosis river. I feel powerful; I have the entire teeming city in one frame. From where I sit, it seems impossible for anyone to get lost down there: right now, everything below bends to fit the parameters of my conception.
And yet, in a few minutes, when I land, I shall be in the heart of a most fantastic, rough-hewn mosaic. The smoothness will disappear with a gentle thud and a rolling of wheels on an old airstrip wanting repair. The neat aerial map will not come to my aid for I shall be within the city that will then only reveal itself in parts. And having been away for so long, I may well get lost in the maze. But for now, hanging in the clouds over the city of my infancy and earliest youth, I think of Dylan Thomas' street-level memories of his own "ugly, lovely, town" in Wales, "crawling, sprawling, slummed, unplanned, jerry-villa's." I think of how, at the end of his reminiscences, the little boy of his own childhood flies away in his fantasy into an aerial dream, flapping his arms "like a large, stout bird like Dracula in a schoolboy cap, over the trees and chimneys of my town."
I think of how Thomas' dream and the 747's dreamlike reality both place us in our most cherished fantasies: of wanting to have our cake and eat it too, of our ardent desire to inhabit (on our own terms) two absurdly incompatible spaces. And of our craving to taste the dust of our childhood around our mouths, albeit parenthesized by transcontinental return tickets.
Yet we are not the disenfranchised of the world. We are not exiles, social or political. That would be a lie, albeit romantic, and our regular long-distance telephone bills and the frequent-flyer points that we earn on them would stand in jarring opposition to any such claim. We are fortune seekers, caravan merchants on a post-industrial hyper-Silk-Route that has spun us out of home and flung us across the confines of our earliest assumptions about the world.
And all this is good. In spite of the occasional (or, in some cases, regular) visits to sundry expat gatherings, both spiritual and secular, we quite like to flaunt the Longines and the Lexus. Our credit cards do not scold us with a reminder of its validity "in India and Nepal only" and our homes do not have to tolerate the Black-Hole-ish tyranny of a Godrej steel monster that swallows any and every "precious/imported/foreign/valuable/invaluable" item that crosses our blessed threshold.
Instead, our homes are temples of material abandon that can only thrive in surfeit: we are always losing the blasted cell-phone under the mountain of CDs, or grumbling about having to use the one un-wired computer at home because the kids never go off-line on the other two. Humming a tune in the shower as the hot water scalds a tired back, we feel happy that we could grumble, that our kids are, indeed, on-line, both at once. And then an uncontrollable urge prompts us into writing a letter in a large, clear and careful hand so that old and bespectacled eyes may read them and feel joy. "Your grandchildren are so good at using the COMPUTER. They are always on the INTERNET. They TYPE their homework and have been doing very well in MATH."
And yet the east orients. Sometimes it comes back at night, in a wavering subliminal space, like a hurricane that throws down your walls and sucks you into its vortex, only to spit you back into your past, scared and scattered. The airplane of your fantasy (and reality) crashes; you shoot out of your comfortable, numbered seat and land right in the heart of your ugly, lovely town (we all have one). Or the flying child of our nostalgia hits a pole or a witch and falls like Icarus from the heavens, the melting wax undoing the wings of our fancy. We awake with a gasp and feel relieved to see the soothing digital glow of the bedside clock. We are here, we say. We shuffle down to the giant fridge and, holding the door open, have a drink of water or juice, straight from the jar. We shuffle back to bed, smoothen the sheets and sleep soundly for the rest of the night.
And in the morning, on the long drive to work, we remember the previous night's dream. Somehow it persists and we simply can't stop thinking about it. And without any warning, we have a floating feeling, like Thomas' child-Dracula in a schoolboy cap, like sitting in a 747 and holding our past in a glass of G&T.
And suddenly, quite suddenly, we know we are so glad to have had the dream, even though we don't always know why. Read more
- Arnab Guha in Canada
November 29, 1999
The views of this column are the author's own, and do not necessarily represent the views of NRI Online.
For a listing of past columns by Arnab Guha, please Know more.
