There’s that moment when you wake up in the middle of the night and you think: that red dot is in the wrong place. It’s a moment of acute disorientation because if the red dot (read red spot of light coming out of some electronic device) is in the wrong place that means someone has moved the television or the computer or the electronic clock that is the only red dot in a dark room. Then you realise: I’m not at home. My red dot is probably where it should be. It is I who am in the wrong place.
The question is: what is the right place to be?
As an adolescent, I dreamed of alien skies. These were unnamed places where my worth would be understood and the memory of Mrs Fijardo asking me to rewrite an essay would fade into the past. As an adult, I understood that you take your hurts and wounds with you; the skies change, the interior landscape remains the same. But of course, what you want, you often get.
Red-eye effect
With a friend, I started a dotcom devoted to travel and began to see some of India. I slept in all kinds of rooms: in five-star hotels and in the various State Tourism Department-run guest houses; and in every one there was a red dot of light in the middle of the night. Sometimes this came off the television; sometimes off the air-conditioner and sometimes out of some unnamed box in the corner of the room which would bear some kind of hyperbolic name: Xperienca or Superba. This box would often also make sounds, strange whirrs and hisses but once I began to treat it like a wild animal—accept its presence in the scheme of things, do not interfere with it, understand that its function in the ecosystem is probably more important than yours—I could live with it.
But in that moment between sleep and waking, the red unblinking eye can be very disconcerting. I remember a time when I went with some friends on a tour of Egypt. We slept every night in a different hotel which meant the red dot of light moved with each shift; just as I got used to that we flew to Turkey where we spent nine days in the same hotel room. I almost made friends with that red dot of light.
Change hits you in unexpected ways. In Goa, when I visited it as a child, it was the strange unearthly quality of the darkness; Moira, my village, did not get electricity until very late and when darkness fell, it landed with a thunderous crash. We had oil lamps and candles and the wood fire over which food was cooked to light up the house. The world was a Jan Steen’s Twelfth Night, all browns and golds. Outside, the darkness was as thick as molasses.
In London, I almost panicked when I walked out into Kilburn High Street on a Sunday afternoon because it seemed that there might have been a riot; the streets were so completely empty of people. My first time in a Paris metro, I was startled by how many different perfumes, some subtle, some sledgehammer-like I could inhale just by turning my head. In the U.S., shopping for vegetables makes me wonder how a nation can have so many varieties of potato and no doodhi/lauki/kaddu . I mean butternut squash is wonderful but it is wonderful in an exotic Master Chef kind of way and costs that way too. I do not know if it will stand up to my time-and-tested Indian recipe for veggies. A friend’s Punjabi mother came to Delhi and made broccoli da saalan . He ate it sonfully but it was not an experiment that either ever repeated.
But each of these changes, we are told, is good for us. The brain is forced to think differently, to respond in other ways. New neural pathways are opened up by unusual activity.
It’s like the manga comics, those that are printed in the Japanese way so you turn to the back and read to the front, making yourself go from right to left across the action, across the boxes, across the conversation bubbles. The books say: You’ll get smarter at the end of it. For once, this is not advertising. You are supposed to get out of your comfort zone. You are supposed to try different things. Your brain does get sharper that way. This is why older people are encouraged to take up new activities; those who worked with their hands are asked to use their minds by way of crosswords and puzzles; those who indulged in mind work are supposed to take up dancing or movement or crafts.
Taught to text
I think of my friend Shirin Sabavala, the wife of the painter Jehangir Sabavala; she died last month. She once asked me to teach me to use a mobile phone and to do email. Most of my other mature friends had made similar requests and most had not learned much before they gave up. But Shirin was different. Over a single weekend when we were on holiday together, I got her to learn how to send short messages. This was because I would make her text me every 20 minutes. And every 20 minutes, she would get her phone out and do her homework, never complaining and refusing to be cowed by the stiffness of her fingers.
At the end of the first day, she was doing a great job but the next morning, she wanted to know how to use capital letters and punctuation; she was old school, she needed to send her missives out with semi-colons if semi-colons were required. We went through the same exercise with email and soon she was attaching documents like a pro.
She was 93 when she died but the last time I met her, she wanted to know how I was, what was going on in the art world and still had crisp opinions on political policy. She was bed-ridden, riddled with cancer but she was not going gently into that unkind night.
I think of her now when I must wipe every inch of my body after a shower because the breeze in New England will cut through layers to find every damp spot; I think of her when I must consult with the Weather Gods before planning my day. I am trying to be flexible. But in the night, when I wake up, and the red dot is in the wrong place, I understand the convulsions of change.
The writer is a poet and novelist.
