Thinking of my neighbourhood in Kurla, I traverse across times to blur the boundaries between the living and dead, all the while conscious of how my experiences with the place and its people came to shape me
I find I’m able to conjure at will all the homes I have known in India. Representation pic/Getty Images
Two months from now it will have been almost exactly a year since I left Delhi and moved to South Tyrol. It’s the longest I’ve been away from India, and the first time I have no return ticket in hand. I’m hoping to be there in September, to finish my fieldwork, but the Pandemic continues to throw all our unequal lives into disarray.
The longer I am away, the more aware I am of the geographical and cultural distance between where I come from and where I am currently situated. I’m surprisingly not lonely.
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In fact, I find I’m able to conjure at will all the homes I have known in India. I have only to close my eyes and I am back in Kurla cursing the giant mall that propped up right across from our colony, and the ensuing traffic snarls, treasuring, still, the sense of calm one feels upon exiting the main road and entering our bubble of five buildings and one bungalow. Sometimes I see the faces of the people I could expectedly meet on my way to our flat. They tell me they read my columns, follow my posts, and are so happy for me.
I pass the grotto outside and invariably do the sign of the cross out of habit, then glance in the direction of the ground floor flat where, for all my childhood and until even my graduation years, I would stop to greet and talk to a lovely lady who lived there until she died more than 100 years after she was born in Byculla. I still feel the breath of her prayers for me. I loved to touch her skin and fold my fingers over the creases of her smile.
I often float into the universe of Garden Rose Colony and inhabit multiple time zones at once so the regions between the dead and the living are blurred. Yesterday I heard the news of the passing of Aunty Philo, our neighbour from A Block, the wife of my brother’s late Godfather. I felt sadness but I also felt sure that her spirit was now one among those of so many other women from our colony who spent so much of their lives in service to the community; organising things, praying, nurturing relationships, distributing communion to the sick and the elderly.
Sometimes I select my encounters with people. Recently I thought of my upstairs neighbour, Ryan, who was my best friend for so many years. I remembered all the hours we spent chatting on either the threshold of his home or mine, exchanging notes about our lives and loves. Sometimes, especially on Sundays, I like to remember the range of culinary smells issuing forth from every apartment, commingling at the intersecting joint of the ‘L’ that connected our inner street to the main road. If you paid attention, you could sift through them and decode the vindaloo from the biryani, though often it was all amorphous and utterly unique; the underlying scent of our lives lived in such close relation with each other.
I think of Kurla a lot these days, not from a space of nostalgia, but in terms of how my childhood and adolescence there shaped me. I don’t ‘miss’ it because I am it and it is within me and I carry it with me wherever I go. My being is activated differently when I am physically present in my neighbourhood. At the Easter mass in Tramin, I simply dwelled on just how much time I had cumulatively spent within the Parish, inside the over 400-year-old church.
Considering my school was within the compound and I went to church daily, that’s possibly more time than anywhere else in my life. I remember re-orienting myself after each church renovation. Every priestly intervention to the interiors seemed more tasteless than the previous one, and I always wondered why they couldn’t just let it be.
The church in Tramin, on the other hand, is architecturally coherent, making it genuinely overwhelming when the pipe organ chimes. The music enters your bloodstream. Our church in Kurla kept expanding to accommodate our population. Singing in the choir was always challenging, because, despite all our practice, the ill-designed sound system diffused our voices faultily. What’s the point of great sonic architecture, though, when you have a rapidly diminishing community of believers, I wondered at the Easter mass.
Where I live now people can afford to not be religious. I am still untangling the extent to which my personhood has been shaped by virtue of belonging to and serving that religious faith.
The further away I am physically from these familiarities, the more easily I am able to access them. The distance seems insignificant because the boundaries are invisible.
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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