Declutter. Pack. Detach.

I am not exactly a Pollyanna, but the glad game is not to be scoffed at; the truth is that there’s some take-away in every situation. Incidentally, the packers turned up, the house has been now stripped of our worldly possessions and looks stranger and more sterile by the minute.  I realised afresh that a home is really made out of knick-knacks and photographs, teenager messes of cords and earphones, mismatched socks in laundry baskets, scrunched up throws on sofas.  Talking of laundry baskets, the presence or absence of one itself is crucial to the feel of home, the bathrooms look oddly unfamiliar, like hotel bathrooms without the bins, just the brushes by themselves on the lonely emptiness of the counters.    And definitely the sink looks massively weird without our early morning coffee mugs in it.

Though our stuff is out on the road, hopefully making its slow way to Alex and then onwards, the MIA is still MIA, and our travel plans have had to be postponed a little.  Two more days of living out of suitcases and eating off disposable plates, camping under a concrete roof.  Waiting for that one phone call, that one email to snap shut the bags and stride out of the door.  Never a dull moment!  And the fun continues apace once we reach our new destination too, as the stuff does not arrive for the next 4-6 weeks.  I just hope we manage the trip there before the boxes do!

I have now moved home 19 times, this one will be my 20th.  There are many apparent negatives to this complete uprooting and moving again and again, especially when there are children involved.  I am sure everyone can imagine the potential horror stories for themselves.  But one of the great things about it, when and only when the uprooting happens through active choice of course, is that the whole process is a kind of systematic and ruthless detox of the immediate micro-environment.  One picks and chooses, one prioritises, one can’t take it all, so what’s worth saving? and passing on?  and what shock horror is to be thrown away? Old clothes have been chucked; you know, those I hung onto in the hope I would be able to fit into them again after slimming down a bit.  Any day now.  Toys given away at school charity drives, food and booze passed on, papers sorted out and trashed.

A mini-lesson in detachment and disengaging, and it always surprises me.  How quickly the mind can bear to tear away from a beloved object, amble out of comfort zones, its eyes fixed on what’s coming rather than what’s gone already.  My books are no longer on the shelves here.  My cutlery not in the kitchen drawers, which open silently without a single metallic rattle.  I am now utterly decluttered.

Egypt is a place I’ve enjoyed deeply. I have gained insights into myself here, grown in completely gobsmacking ways travelling this country.  It’s been the setting of many milestones for me and my family.  I have loved living here to bits.  But it is no longer home.  How easy it is to write that down.  And my god, how difficult!

Waiting

I sing to use the waiting
my bonnet but to tie
and shut the door unto my house
no more to do have I... ~ Emily Dickinson.


That verse feels so apt today!

The thing with waiting is that - practice doesn't make perfect.  However many millions of times it is done, it is still difficult, and difficult not with the hugeness of an obstacle which at the end gives relief and a sense of achievement that one was able to surmount it; but a fuzzy irritant like a moving pebble in a shoe that one can't wiggle out without either taking the shoe off or feeling absurd about taking so much trouble over such a small thing.  It's a no-win situation like no other.

I have done a lot of waiting - I have waited for the school bell to ring; the holidays to come around; I've waited on platforms and departure lounges and transit halls for trains and planes; for exam results; for editors' answers; for doctors' and lab technicians' reports.  Right now, I am waiting for my Cairo life to end, and to know exactly when I can make a new start in a different place. The problem with that boils down to a lack of control, I can't actively hurry the process, I can't delay it, it happens outside the range of my understanding and knowledge, there is nothing I can do except, well, wait.

I haven't got discernibly better at the waiting over the years.  But what I have learnt is to manage my impatience better. The pebble must take its own time to free itself from my shoe and in the process free my foot too;  I have just learnt to keep on walking, to ignore the discomfort, to focus on a different distraction.  Some days that pebble feels as large as a boulder, some other time I can shrink it to a mere grain. Today isn't a grain day, it's a boulder day, and my feet hurt, so it's a good idea to sit down and read some Emily Dickinson.  Tomorrow I'll be up and walking again.

Tanoura

This week I went back to the Wikala al Ghouri to watch the Tanoura again. Somehow it has so happened that I have been going back to watch those Sufis at pretty regular intervals throughout the past six years that I have been living in Cairo.  With and without guests.  This last time, which is the last time really before I leave for good, it is a goodbye of sorts.  I am touching all the places and things that I have enjoyed about this city in a final gesture of farewell and then it's over, I detach and focus on what is to come rather than what I leave behind and how I wrench myself out, away from all the dear and familiar patterns.

The troupe were their usual mesmerising selves, the performance was crisper, amazingly lively.  Probably each member of the audience feels this - that the performers speak directly to them, yet are actually not performing at all, because this is not a dance, it is an internal spiritual quest.  That something devotional and spiritual can be so exuberant, so joyous, such an audio-visual, sensuous feast! It is almost difficult to reconcile that idea with our usual notions of austere spirituality.  It always makes me feel uncomfortably wet about the eyelashes for all my wishy-washy wavering atheism, and equally it makes me want to get up and start dancing myself.  The energies and the high are just magnificent.  Definitely I wanted to go back and watch it once before I left, and now it's done.  And a sense of huge peace in the doing.

A giant leap remade into tiny

I just finished gorging on the radio drama of Chander Pahar a few days ago, a famous staple from my childhood, and my first introduction to Africa. That book is still there in my old room at my mum’s, a spontaneous gift to me from a much older cousin after he’d finished with it. My mother read it to me, chapter by chapter, through the afternoons officially meant for napping.  The only reason for that must have been her love for reading aloud to me, because by then I could read myself.  Very little napping got done, obviously.  She read it to me once, and then I read it on my own again.  I have been reading and rereading it and listening to it all through my life. It’s one of those timeless experiences that one doesn’t tire of, even after childhood is long over.  The book cover (which was designed by Satyajit Ray, no less, only he hadn't the cult status then) has come off and been sellotaped many times, the silverfish have got to it too, I saw one year on home leave, Kolkata is so hard on books.  But unlike my cousin, I have never managed to finish with it.


Right into Chander Pahar country

A year after my mum read it to me, she broke the news in her typical, gentle-lead-ups-are-only-for-sissies way that we were moving from Delhi.  Oh, really? So, we were going back to Kolkata, to my grandparent’s house?  No, to Africa! Immediately the simple but effective illustrations of the open African grasslands, peppered with the acacia and the baobab, the vastness and the majesty, flashed into my brain.  I had no problem identifying the first baobab I saw on landing in Kano. 

Unlike Shankar in Chander Pahar, my father’s job in West Africa did not require him to stay in tents rigged out in the bush, we lived in regular houses with flushing toilets and electric hobs, and I even got to go to school and all. However, the culture shock was severely truncated. Everything was new and different, but nothing was much of a jolt.  I sat in a classroom made out of tin sheets nailed to wooden stakes driven into the sandy ground.  We watched films at the officers club out in the open air, one of the officers doubled up for projector duty, sometimes the screening was interrupted by a viper slithering in between the rows of metal chairs.  I wasn’t very surprised at anything, not at all put out. Hadn’t Shankar, the protagonist of the book, faced down a black mamba, way more evil than vipers?  Hadn’t he been threatened by lions?  This was Africa! Anything was possible! A travel adventure story created by someone who had never set foot in this continent yet captured it accurately and magnificently in polished prose was my guide, buffer and comfort blanket all-in-one.

From a giant leap...

Much later into teenage I heard my mother relate an anecdote from her single days.  That someone had read her palm once at one of those light-hearted gatherings where all unmarried women of a certain age get their fortunes told; she had been given a reading that she will go into the “faraway lands of the rakshasas”, and the political incorrectness apart, had no difficulty in equating Africa with that reading and the accuracy of that long-ago prediction.

Neither of my parents come from lines of intrepid adventurers, the farthest anyone in both their families had settled was Northern India, in places like Chandigarh, Lucknow, Delhi, the really brave in Ahmedabad maybe.  For my mother, growing up and living practically all her life in Kolkata, moving to Delhi must have been daunting.  But at least she knew other family members, distant cousins, friends-of-friends there, people to help settle her in.  Delhi was the capital, it had the best infrastructure, the best prospects, so what if the language was different?  A postcard took only a couple days to reach, you could get on a train one evening and reach home 24 hours later. But Africa? No-one she knew in the whole continent, no-one except the cultural attaché in Delhi to advise her; and an old class-fellow of my father's who was working there already. Moving was a giant leap of faith. 

...to a tiny one

Almost twenty five years later, I watched a plane take off with my husband in it and understood exactly how high that leap was.  We were relocating to Bahrain, a country where we knew not one soul.  Six months earlier, I didn't know its coordinates.  I didn't sleep that night in a haze of diffuse anxiety. I have this hyper-active imagination, I dreamt up a massive range of somewhat negative what if scenarios in a short couple of hours. There was only a fixed telephone line at home, he called that almost a day later to inform about his arrival.  My mum-in-law and I sighed audibly in relief.  

Subsequently things have changed a little. We have relocated a few times since that first move.  From late nineties onwards, there's been internet at home, so that an armchair reconnaissance could be carried out as soon as postings were finalised. I have left messages in expat blogs/forums asking for help on the specifics, and got answers from perfect strangers who were kind enough to respond. Moving has lost that fear factor,  that huge, arching leap into the completely unknown.  It just retains a sense of adventure and anticipation. Expat life has its own downsides of course, but one thing it doesn't do well is boredom.