There’s a lot of things you have to adapt to when living away from home. Buses don’t stop when you run behind them, drinking water comes out of the tap and chai is called tea latte and will cost you a misspelt name and two hundred rupees. You give up trying to find idli batter and start making pancakes and toast for breakfast.
Summer is 13 degrees and the sun doesn’t set till ten. The road traffic orientation is inverted, and cars look driverless at first glance. For a 22-year-old displaced from home and planted in a foreign country for the first time, these were all pretty alarming situations to deal with.
But my true test awaited in the bathroom in the form of gleaming white rolls of toilet paper. Except for the giant bathtub, there was no familiar faucet or any other source of water nearby. My mind grappled with the idea of accepting this quirk of foreignness too, but in the end, I couldn’t do it. Having been brought up in a Kerala home with an abundance of water, a roll of paper had absolutely no place in the cleaning process. I blessed the friend who had suggested that I get a mug, and placed it in its rightful position next to the toilet paper.
It was all smooth-sailing from there, except for one awkward conversation with my roommate explaining why I wouldn’t be spending for that particular utility.
From that day on, I used a metaphorical line of toilet paper to justify my decision to come back and work in India. For me, that line has come to represent all the small comforts we give up when living away from home — like unabashedly singing while strolling through the streets or even smiling at a cute baby. Doing either of those here might be construed as the symptoms of being a crazy kidnapper-lady.
You are always aware of how different you are from the people around, and you have no way of knowing what is going on in their head. This is unnerving, to say the least, and I’ve often found myself nostalgic about the judgmental mausis back home whose thoughts were as unpredictable as the Bollywood movies.
This strangeness causes you to be constantly alert, and the smallest incident can break your bubble of self-esteem. A snide comment from a passer-by or your grocery bag breaking open on the street, is all it takes for you to crave the familiarity of home. And it is for that sense of assuredness that I hope I will come back to India — if only to joyfully fall off my cycle and laugh about it.
p arvathi.mad96@gmail.com
