Home

I've never felt the sense of belonging back home. Even when I was just a kid I used to feel like a fledgling that could take off anytime one day and never return. So, I regarded home and the people around with that amused sympathy typical of roamers. 

With some misguided sense of manners and etiquettes instilled from early years by an anglophile mother, I hated the degree of crudeness in the people around me. Sometimes I wondered whether the whole sense of not belonging was a defense against the crudeness in people that I was forced to accept as a part of the living experience here.

During my stay in Europe, I never felt a part of it either. I constantly felt alien, despite the accommodating nature of Italians. Observing the immigrants, who were people like the ones back home, reluctant to adopt the European civility, I felt ill at ease due to the fact that I was one of them. And I felt helpless that how much ever I consider myself separate and behave so, I'll still be an immigrant, a broad species that covers a wide variety of personalities amongst which I detested being classified. 

It is than that I started wondering where I really belonged. Perhaps, if they ever colonise some uninhabited planet, I could be settle there happily among the first inhabitants and feel truly at home.

Thalassery Accounts

This was the time I had returned from Italy and had taken up a temporary teaching assignment in an obscure law school in northern Kerala. Numb after the sudden return from Europe, I remained pretty lost all the time having no idea what I should do next. It was then that an old professor had referred me to this University.

At about seven kilometers from the seaside town of Thalassery where I stayed in a small lodge, the campus was placed in a seaside village that mildly reeked of fish. Every morning, I drove by the side of a murky green sea on my wobbly old 115cc bike with a worn out chain which kept rubbing the metal chain cover.

The kids would blankly stare at me from the classroom windows when I put the bike in its stand.  They were friendly and naïve. But they occasionally came to us all worked up demanding more marks in internal tests. There was a nice canteen run by a couple of women. The food was very inexpensive and didn’t taste bad at all. I looked forward to the breaks and got in to polish off a snack or two.

I took an unfounded joy in being really careless the way I looked and dressed during this time. A weedy beard grew by itself when I stopped shaving and kept growing. I kept 3 long sleeved kurtas that I wore on alternative days laundering each every night. To save on weight to be carried when I left for home on weekends, I never kept a towel and instead used one of them for a bath towel. The kids had never seen me in my normal self and took me for one of those crazy beardos with existentialist issues.

In the lodge, I had a room that had windows to the direction of the sea which was just a minute’s walk away. When the humid sea winds and the hot noon sun warmed it up unbearably, I worked on the old computer and slept off stark naked inside the room. Every night I slept off re-watching Seinfeld episodes. When it got really stuffy, I would get out of the room and walk around the town aimlessly. There was a decayed pier like thing that extended a long way into the sea. I would sit on its farthermost tip hanging my legs and relish the scare that the waves crashing around me gave. A lone peanut seller roasted peanuts on a cart and I kept wondering how he managed to do it under the stiff sea winds. I would end up finally at the Overbury's Folly, where I'd sit staring at the sea till darkness covered everything except the swishes and swashes of the waves below.

It never made sense to me what I was doing.

There was Mahé, a former small French colony about a few five minutes bus ride from my lodge, where alcohol was cheap and available freely. But I had quit drinking altogether and that left a crawly void inside that I could fill up only by walking. So I kept walking and the fatigue gave a dull high on.

Once in every week, I took a lottery ticket and unenthusiastically waited for its results. I’d never won a lottery in my life and had no hopes of it happening ever. I was merely exploring whether sharp deflections really happened in life. In fact, I knew that a huge cache of money could only complicate my messy life for a while and return it to the same state once it gets over.

I ate tiny bananas and fried snacks dripping with oil.

I stayed there for almost two months. Another place, another set of memories.  

The Chainless Bike Story

On that summer evening, I decided to desert my bike. It had been just five months since I had bought it from a flea market in Turin for €25. Can't say I’d used it much. It remained indoors most of the time when it was raining or snowing. By the end of the fourth month, the chain became so loose that it started making an awfully shrill noise rubbing on the chain cover.

I had finally decided to leave Turin in July and thought of selling the contraption, now sans a chain which I had removed in the hope of replacing. I tried selling it at two used stuff shops with long notes explaining it all translated into Italian. They all refused, either suspecting it to be stolen or really having a policy of buying stuff from usual trusted sources as they claimed.

By the eve of my departure, I started panicking as the landlord had instructed me not to leave anything lying around. And then I decided to abandon the bike. When I made up my mind, I felt oddly mighty. It was all to do with the newly realized discretion associated with that decision. I could just give it away to anyone and according to me, change their lives.

So, on that night before departure, I set off to see a friend pushing the chainless bike along, planning to hand it over to the first person I felt deserved. The first one who came to my mind was the really old man I often saw downstairs in the night who seemed to be a volunteer of some sort. After waiting for him for a while and when he didn’t turn up, I moved on in search of the next prospective recipient.

The next one that came to my mind was a hooker I often saw standing somewhere in Via Ventimiglia, on my desperate waiting for buses in the night. We had developed a curious bond with she waiting for customers in the passing cars and me waiting for the infamous GTT buses that are often infrequent in the night.

I was a bit nervous about her reaction. My biggest drawback was the language barrier. Maybe she would think that I a penniless jerk who’d want some of her time for the chainless bike. So, I decided to be very expressive with my actions - hand it over, make some wild gestures as to how I wanted nothing in return and flee.

I pushed on with that piteous bike that warm July night, sweating my way through via ventimiglia. It was a Saturday and the entire province seemed to be high on. There were youngsters staggering along on the way, unsteady women balancing themselves on their partners, bands of boys shouting and howling. And I couldn't find the lady anywhere. Maybe, she got a client or she had shifted to someplace else. After waiting for her for a while, I started for the city centre where my friend lived.

Two sloshed boys lying on a bench stopped me on the way asking whether I had a cigarette to spare and for no reason I replied “Io non fumo”. One of them tried hoplessly to show me a middle finger and failed, falling down in the process.  

The bike was slowly becoming a burden and I was losing my grip on the philanthropic designs. And suddenly, a wave of emotion swept me across. Looking at the biwheeled contraption that I was pushing along, I felt a gushing pity. It was like a sick dog that had served its time. Without protesting, it silently followed me to its uncertain future. But all I could do was shed a few selfish tears and proceed with the job for I was severing my ties with Turin by the next day and the bike was a liability that I could not afford to take.

Moving across the metro station at Lingotto, I reached Eataly, where I had first stopped to take a pause on my journey back home from the flea market six months ago with the bike. I remember locking the bike to the parking rack and getting some cheese from Eataly. I remembered admiring it that day from a distance. I kept it in the same rack, mimicked a locking action and turned to leave. On a forethought, I took my phone and with its weak excuse for a camera, took two snaps of the bike bathed in yellow street light. And I left.

By the time I was back after three hours, it had disappeared. The small blue and white bike without a chain.

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I even lost the snaps I'd taken when I lost my phone after returning to India in one of my travels.  The snap above - courtesy to Nicolas Borgsmidt (nicgallery blog)

Torino, 18.05.2013, 1:15 am

The DJ took a final look at the silhouettes of the empty bottles on the tables and the dim lit floor of the Café before he stepped out. It was silence again after he left in his small old Fiat Panda, the sound of its engine dying slowly with the distance. 

A January night returning to retrieve something on a sudden realization. It was that chilly.  Occasional winds blew erratically fluttering the dark green spring foliage and the drapes over open windows.  Wispy lights across the Po struggled through a seemingly hesitant fog. 

A rabbit hopped across, pausing momentarily and disappeared in a flash. Mallards called out softly once in a while, breaking the silence.

Chill had seeped into metal of the chairs outside the café. Feeble sound waves from afar, maybe one of those clubs in Valentino Park, infrequently made themselves heard. 

A quiet cold spring night.

Veo que te debo tanto

Like a torchlight disappearing in the sun, I get stuck for words confronting this higher form of expression. Realizing the distance to fare for the scribbled words to become a work of art, they hang their head in shame. 

Music communicates is what they say. For me, it just brings me closer to my perceived notion of death. Not in a fearful way. An unrivaled serenity.  The soul subtly craving for liberation. It is as if that is the only thing which can move the soul to a state of emotion. 

Redefining my perception of beauty and perfection, it spreads through the volumes of nothingness within. Flesh dissolves and the skin takes a crystalline form jealously holding the exquisitely crafted frequencies of these mechanical waves from escaping. 

For this moment of unmatchable bliss, I thank the creator for including ears.

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"Perdóname"  Pablo Alborán and  Carminho
"Tanto" (Fans Version) Pablo Alborán, Virginia Elosegui and Others