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Nayan Tarse

Everything will be fine.

Then, one day, I'll wake up to a vague ache in my heart, an echo in my ears - merely an incoherent sound that has yet to be born and borne. It is not any language that I've heard before. Indeed, it's not a language at all. It's more of a cry. The woody, hollow lilt of a pan flute. Onomatopoeia.

Slowly. Surely. Slowly, but surely, it takes form. It twists and turns, ravaging internal musculature, organs with every move it takes. This is not a dormant child. It's conception was not immaculate. Each movement thrums a chord of loss. Every breath threatens to rip the entire scaffolding of body, nerves, tendons, systems - apart.

It leaves me bereft.

Then, suddenly, everything is not so fine.

There is white noise. Radio waves, frequencies travelled, hurtling through space. The dial moves on, relentlessly and takes me with it and I'm going back and forth, back and forth, waiting. Waiting for that voice, waiting for what I know lies in wait for me.

By the fourth day, it has a body. It has form made primarily by scavenging the busy highways of my veins, scraping the walls of my mind and memories, collecting visions from eyes in little glass vials, sweeping dust from the hidden corners of my heart. In these, it sheathes itself, the homeless wanderer wearing another shroud.

Small images is what it feeds on. Sounds. Words.

Images of dirty, scruffy, hungry children accosting people at traffic lights. Sounds of ghalib set to sitar. The words of Tagore. Then the more ugly realities: mass amounts of smog, pollution, corruption, bureaucracy, inequality, religious politics, a crumbling infrastructure. And all these supported by an absurd notion that somehow culture withstands and corrects all.

Culture - honour, respect, piety, shame and other half-baked, mythical constructs - will save them all.

Sometimes, I hate it all. Sometimes, I feel so much anger, I cannot believe it to be real. Those are the times everything is fine.

But then, the ache becomes real and the echo becomes coherent. Both are born, despite my protest, beyond my acknowledgement. Whether I take them in or not, whether I name them or not, whether I hold their helpless and feeble bodies in my hands or not, they are there. To stay.

I have a choice. I can deny. Or I can accept.

I cannot help but be beguiled by the land, even if it lives like a painted frame, mostly in my head. I cannot believe this land that I have dreamed about for so long must be real. Somehow, Google maps alienates me even further. Somehow, the slums that occupy such a vast majority of the physical land - so much so, that it is visible from space - cannot be real. There cannot be millions upon millions of little barefoot children scavenging those heaps of rubbish. There cannot be women being trafficked. There cannot be computers being built and cars solds on EMIs.

What the hell is an EMI?

Some days are worse than others. I'll outwardly scoff at a conversation on the bus - but I'll internally take a small inane kind of pleasure at the language I both know and don't know so well. I'll drown myself in arthouse movies from the 60s knowing this can never be enough.

Knowing, always, I must return. Knowing that it is inevitable that I -

Someday -

Somehow -

Somewhen -

Somewhy -

Go back.

Try and understand why it was home to so many before me. Uncover the pain of a relative trapped by her father. Unearth the roots of illogic and discover why mostly everyone in the family is stark raving mad.

This is only the face of the Beast in the Jungle. Only one aspect of its being. As it stalks out, carefully, from the underbrush into the full sunlight over the years, revealing itself more fully, I will come to see it and meet it head-on.

Inevitable is not only my demise but my return to that country. Equally as unquenchable is my thirst to know the self through the selves of others, the ghosts of past. Inextinguishable is the hope that somehow I will return to being human on this sub-continent. Real is the fear that it will be the exact opposite of that. Strong is the connection, the unbridled passion that pushes me forward, towards something - whether better or not, it remains to be seen.

Not flee.

But - Go, I must.

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