Favorite Book of 2024

September 9, 2024

         I’m writing from my daughter’s home. This is our second time living here and this time we both, my spouse and I, feel scattered and sluggish. Last time my spouse did better. Last time I didn’t even try to do better. We had moved homes, after which I had gone to Bombay almost immediately for five weeks, and barely had I returned and lived in my new home for two weeks when we had moved here to cat sit. I spent most of my time ‘being under’ and wishing I were home — the new not yet lived in one. My spouse held the space and the time here so we/I were/was able to survive it. I had also bumped my head on the third or fourth day here, had a vertigo attack mid-stay, and severe allergic reaction to cat fur and odours in this neighbourhood throughout the two weeks.

Luckily the sofa in their living room has a view — of short trees just outside, a patch of grass with taller ones across the street, and the top of the ARC and much taller trees in the distance. I spent most of my time on their sofa making sketches of the trees and the sky, and of people waiting at the bus stop across the street.

This time I am trying to get more done, including exercise. I am finishing up reading what for me is the best book of 2024. Hisham Matar — My Friends. 

The book is about many things but a few of the themes it delves into include friendship, what keeps us close, or apart, even in what feels like the strongest of bonds. It also talks about home, being away from home, and about whether one ever can really go back. Some can be pulled by an inexplicable desire — sometimes familial, sometimes political, and most often a primal, preverbal longing — back to home which is still home. While others return for a particular relationship and still others fear returning at all. 

Why does the same friendship contain both powerful connections and an unbridgeable silence? Why and how, do some intense friendships change when we live apart longer than we live close by, and the time spent together becomes about just catching each other up to the happenings in our lives. I had felt this the last time I was in Bombay in January, when I had met some of my friends. I missed the being in ‘the moment that existed’ feeling that used to be there. Conversations this time around were about the broader sweeps of happenings in our lives, and only momentarily dove deeper into something that the psyche was grappling with in that moment or in that week or in that month, and the processes that it had already been through. And other friendships, just as strong but built perhaps not around an intimate emotional connection but around an external activity that felt constant whether all were doing that activity or not in the present — friendships that may have felt less deep than the other ones, somehow seemed better at being in that moment than the deeper ones that earlier were the perfect ones to contain the moment. 

And what of friendships where the people involved who had the same strong feelings about something suddenly are on diverging paths. As the path diverges does the connection get looser, weaker, less important even? 

And leaving home and returning is completely different for everyone. Making a home in a new place is harder for some than others. And then having learnt how to do it in one place doesn’t necessarily free one of the fear of uprooting and trying to root elsewhere. Some need this rooting to do anything meaningful and others wander gathering or trying to at least gather meaning. And return is something some slip into, but others never can as they always feel alienated by the fact that they were away and changed in a myriad of ways that they sometimes cannot dare share with those who never left. 

Moving here has changed me in places I thought were unchangeable. And I am pondering that. I think the need to write memoir is less about sharing parts of my life with others and only about trying to make sense of who I was, I am, and want to be. 

This book, My Friends, is fiction though reads like life. It took me to many places and there is an urge to finish and start again at the beginning at once. Do read it if you get a chance. And do share with me what you thought about it.