Many friends often tell me that it takes a lot of courage to move to an entirely new reality and to adjust as quickly as I have. Pic/Getty Images
On Monday, for the first time in over a month, we drove beyond Tramin, to Ritten, a mountain near Bozen, to help a friend with cataloguing art books from her father's library. It's the same gig I had done for about two weeks in August. We'd decided we'd return to it again for two weeks between end November and early December.
It's been good to be able to move between towns, even though South Tyrol still feels deserted, thanks to the continuing lockdown. In four days there will be a gradual re-opening, and maybe the curfew will be lifted too.
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Last weekend we participated in the voluntary, free mass-testing operation, a brilliant strategy to simply isolate existing cases before considering re-opening. In a local weekly magazine, a satirist asked in his column, 'When will the quarantine end?' and responds, 'When the next Corona wave hits.' This dark humour really does encapsulate our new reality.
For three weeks, I have been watching the news diligently at 8 pm. I think it's the moment when I feel the most dislocated. Firstly, all the anchors speak in calm, reassuring voices. When there's a debate, two people are invited to the studio and they stand on opposite sides of a podium and gracefully present their points of view. There doesn't seem to be the need for consensus. Both perspectives seem equally valid.
The news anchor sometimes interviews guests, like the governor of South Tyrol, on the show. He stands in one corner of the set and calmly reassures everyone that everything is under control and thanks them for participating in the mass testing.
Some of the news segments feel indeed bizarre. There was, recently, a five-minute segment called 'Bieber Feber' which captured South Tyrol's unique excitement about the first sighting of a beaver in 400 years. Two days ago there was a report about a new moth discovered near the Rosengarten, a mountain chain of the Dolomites.
Once, months ago, there was a briefing about a mushroom forager who, unfortunately, got stung by a wasp. Yesterday I tried to make sense of a five-minute-long segment in which a 10-year-old boy was interviewed. He had been stuck in quarantine for over a month because all his family members kept getting tested positive one by one. Two days ago there was something about an ingenious new way of having Santa or Sankt Nikolas greeting children in Corona times, by sitting inside a giant snow globe and reaching his palm onto the glass. Kids could touch him from the outer end.
I know, logically, that this is what it means to live in a small town, where the lockdown brings in a shortage of news. But when I sleep at night I have this awareness of living in a bubble. I think of all that's going down in India and all the ensuing hyperventilation that manifests on news networks, coupled with the falsification of reality and the perpetuation of the categorically untrue as fact and the parading of fiction as truth.
Last night I wondered if this is precisely what it means to feel dislocated? Then again I wish more regions in the world had more slow news days and could afford to have one whole segment dedicated to how Vitamin D is a good safeguard against the virus. My mother-in-law was beside herself during this part. "Why is the news broadcast offering health advice?" she wondered aloud. She herself is from Augsburg in Germany. She listens to an Augsburg radio channel each morning on the internet radio device in the kitchen while she eats breakfast. I imagine this is how she has managed to locate herself all these years.
Many friends often tell me that it takes a lot of courage to move to an entirely new reality and to adjust as quickly as I have, and find work, and manage a livelihood. The truth is, even though I feel dislocated, frequently, I feel less of a sense of alienation than I felt back in India.
On our drive this morning to Ritten, I was telling my partner about how, after venturing outside the borders of Kurla for the first time in my life, when I began Junior College at St. Xavier's, I experienced my first taste of what it meant to feel like an outsider, even though I was in a minority institution run by Christians. I shrank into a shell for many years because everyone around me seemed to know so much more, was so much smarter, better educated, better dressed.
Later, when I moved to Delhi to do my Masters at JNU, the feeling of alienation followed. I was the only Goan Catholic on the premise. I found it difficult to relate to everyone else's conception of what it meant to be Indian. I still struggle with that.
I often took comfort in believing there must never be a singular way of being anything. These days, it's when my parents tell me they ate prawn curry, or made something with curry leaf that I feel a somewhat crippling longing. Having now spent so much time in South Tyrol, my biggest fear is not knowing anymore the reality of the place to which I would, at some point, return, and if I can, ever, truly 'go back'.
Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D'Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper
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