Bombay!

April 18, 2022

 

I don’t think I’ve ever written a blog post from Bombay. 

I am sitting in the ‘swing’ balcony as we now call it, after my sister changed most of the upholstery from green to coral. My daughter and spouse sit here too, reading or working on their devices. It is our morning spot where we gather before the busy day. 

 

This is the beginning of the second week in Bombay, and last evening something painful and heavy slipped below the light, happy tones of the first week of joyous reunion, and made its presence felt strongly. It could just be that my daughter is leaving tomorrow and a feeling that the best part of the trip is over is growing in my belly, or a horrid dehydration and dizziness due to the heat, and dust, and perhaps some mold too, is making my head reel. 

 

But I think it is a lot more. 

 

Suddenly I feel aware that I am 61 and I don’t know where I will live the rest of my life. Suddenly, and this is the painful part, I don’t know where home is. It used to feel I had two homes but now I feel I have none. After two years of not visiting periodically, this here doesn’t feel home, and nor really does Singy. I was content with a sense that I would move between homes and have the best of both worlds but now, though I can’t exactly define this, I feel I am without roots. I also feel like I don’t want to live in a country other than the one my daughter lives in. 

 

There is also the dark awareness that I don’t know where my life is heading or who I am. This visit, my spouse cleared his corner cupboard — where he stores his stuff and ‘memories’ — and layers of my life emerged. Among letters and photos which we squealed over, he found an article from the Mumbai Mirror featuring me and my friend Charmayne’s dream workshops in the section on alternate healing. I realized that unlike many lives more stable, with definite paths, mine has changed constantly and I haven’t been able to predict where it was heading next since I was tiny. It feels like I had no plan ever?

 

At 15 I didn’t know I would convince my traditional and patriarchal joint family to allow me to study Physics at University in the US. At 25 I didn’t know that my life would take another sharp turn and I would drop all selves that I knew previously and be moved towards working with human rights violations. At 35 I didn’t know that in a few years I’d study psychotherapy and dream work or that I would be drawn into vipassana Buddhism, or that before 45 I’d start training in karate.

 

And this goes on and on — as every few years I seem to simply re-invent who I was. Perhaps the previous identities assimilate in some way within, but I do have trouble recognizing the selves and lives that emerged from that dusty closet. And today I don’t know where I will be in five years, or ten, or ever. Today this is unnerving me, making me shaky. 

 

This week I will find my way to the Bombay dojo and see my friends there and meet up with other friends from other stages of my life – school friends, human rights work friends, therapy days friends – and this will likely cause some of this unease to ebb. But I also think that though running about and meeting them will temporarily cover up the unstable feelings lurking deeper, I am going to have to confront these very soon.