Travlegoues of an exiled mind - Part 2

Dilema of Duality

The best thing about being in exile is that you are have enough room to be self sympathetic. You say you love your place, the old village/town, the old air, the lack of frenetic pace. Hey! Hold on. Lack of frenetic pace!! And you love that? Then why the heck are you living in Mumbai? Or for that matter in any of the fast paced metros. Or A, B, C, D or any alphanumeric graded secondary city where at least you have to run to cross the road and not be able to amble across the tar slurping a choco bar. So, you love the lack of speed. But yet every morning you say that the bus is late, you run from your house grabbing the breakfast toast/idli/dhokla/roti roll. You 'wabble' in your ability to do things fast. You are smugly esconced in your pad every night which was possible only by your acquired ability to run fast. Yet, when you are milder in thought (sobriety, sometimes, being the driver of mildness) you pine for that - place of birth.

The 'problem' is we all do that, I do that. The reason is when you have enough to quench your apetiete for - food, success, money, fame, the works - then you start for other things. Call it Heizelberg's pyramid or any other theory. Vivekanada had said 'Do not teach spirituality to the hungry, you will gain nothing and neither will he.' We start to crave for the old road back 'home' when we see that we are STILL not happy with all that we have. And never will. What the comfortable familiarity of those 'left' roads and lands can give you, nothing else can. We do not actually want the smell of the land as such, but a quick runaway in mindspace. Well, MOST of the times. Naipual lives in far away lands and writes about how much ruined and wounded our civilisation is. Jhumpa Lahiri is stuck in the first gen/second gen dilema of every gen of the USA. Kafka ran off to the snow filled mountains of a different country and yet his the smells of his country that drove him to narcissist madness never left him. Heminway wrote in Africa from within the window frame from his American past.

There is no escape.
But for us lesser mortals, self sympathy - and immensely satifying at that - is what a sense of exile can give you. Nothing else. You can't go back home, you can't leave your adopted space. In someway, and very deep down, you actually love your new place. The duality of your origin and acquired surroundings can never let you rest in peace.

Paris is the city of love. But you can't love there, like the Parisians do. Because the air that enchants your senses and stimulates your sensuality should be saturated with mogra. It should be warmer, maybe with a hint of petrol smoke or burning coal. There, necessarily, should be ogling passersby (or even completely static loafers eating peanuts). Because therein lies your need for discretion in holding hands or putting his arm around her waist or her hand in his hip pocket. That makes the sweat of palms exchange each other, that makes the grip tantalisingly taut. But but but. When you are living in Paris, will you not kiss in public? You will. Because that's the 'freedom' you have seen on TV and the movies. You will love that. Yet you WILL pine for the 'restrictive' world of burdensome society to love in.

That's the seething duality that never lets you in peace.

How does that fit into self sympathy? Well that's a fringe benefit you extract from this dilema which you will never confess about. The fact that you will love in Paris and enjoy the pestilent race of your city/town, is disturbing. If you sometime acknowledge even the existence of this duality of thought, your uprootedness is vindicated. Complete and irreversible. Which you will never be able to come to terms with.

TBC ......