Diary entry - 28/1/2019

The canteen window gestured to the winter sky, desperately preparing to pour down. When the heavy clouds were brawling, my lips were soaked in the steam puffing sugarless coffee. Very typical of a semester beginning, thoughts were grazing in the valley of academia until the glaring clock pulled my eyes out of its sockets. I gulped down the coffee with an oily bite of omelet and rushed into the lecture hall on the first floor.

Into the cacophony of the room, the professor with strangely fashioned white whiskers entered and verbally involved himself in Mrinal Sen and his art. Though impregnated with wisdom, it went tiresomely long till he paused!

The lights disappeared for the projector to beam moving images, Bengali font and English subtitles. Despite many impeding heads of various sizes, planted on necks of various lengths, I read -

Chaalchitra

Directed by Mrinal Sen

After one and half hours of intermittent fits of laughter and journeying into old memories, I walked out of the red brick building- a little contented and calmer!  Out in the dark, the neon lights were waiting to hear my madness…

 

Who are we? Stories. We are stories that are inherited, invented and shared.

The world is divided into stories that are unfamiliar and familiar. Unfamiliar stories may incite our nerves of curiosity but we can only be trespassers in that premise.  We truly belong to stories that are familiar and no struggle is required to sense the embedded layers. Isn’t that how home feels like?

What is home for most of us? Probably a concrete configuration which is a phone call away, a few text messages away or flight tickets away. To me, home is memories away and mostly, a matter of physical absence. Chaalchitra took me home through its quintessential representation of middle class lives. Its conflicts, gatherings and aspirations never felt like an alien visual experience but a reminder of all that has been lost and unforgotten. It took me back to all those distant and otherwise unremembered moments which still root me to life.

The first fourteen years of my life belong to an insignificant rural geography from where I saw the world less complicated and more kind. Remaining seven and half years of my life saw half a dozen geographical displacements and perturbations. Displacements were revelations, as they disentangled me from the notion of home as four walls. Consequentially, detachment and existential crisis solidified. No one, nowhere or nothing to go back to is a quotidian dilemma. The only prayer I know is, “I am everyone’s none.”

At times, the journey to adulthood is nothing but a swelling void. Supposedly, we try to fill it with our materialistic achievements but it is never enough! We travel miles and hours and still remain as empty as ever or even more. We are lost, not knowing whether to exist aligning with farcical norms or to pave a path against the odds or simply, give up.  Almost half a year into a big city, I know for a fact that even if bigger cities beckon me with the best of opportunities and promises, I can only be an adulterated version of my true self there. I can only be the refugee with better surviving skills. I can only be someone else but not me.

 Where did I lose myself? Where am I? Where can I find myself?

 In a dominantly factual and quantitative world, these questions may appear to be too invalid to be answered. As long as they remain unanswered and unaddressed, you are enslaved to textbooks, office cabins, luxuries offered by credit cards and psychiatric prescriptions.

Yes, I am light years away from my happier version. I am light years away from my hopeful version. I am light years away from my peaceful version. I am constantly searching for myself.