One word: Paltry.
Shifting houses, wrapping up, packing stuff, managing the movers, shipping off, and finally moving out with one final glance behind, but gaze fixed firmly forward, in anticipation of the new house and new life that awaited. My life has been like this since I was born. In fact, I was born in Sadashiv Peth, Pune and ‘shifted’ to the Jorhat Air Force Base when I was just 4 months old (landing in my new home on new year’s day on 1st January 1973).
That was actually my second ‘shifting’, after the first, when I exited my mother’s womb after 9 months of extremely hospitable stay. Since then, moving out and finding a new home has been simply part of life. Baba’s job in the Indian Air Force meant that by the time I completed the first 10 years of schooling, I had changed 11 schools (and passed out from the 12th).
Every couple of years or so, we’d move. It was like a festival that arrived on a regular basis. And the rituals and traditions of helping Maa pack the delicate crockery, sitting on suitcases to close them, struggling with locks, painting Baba’s rank, name, and destination on large metal trunks, following the ‘Bhaiyyas’ who came to load them into the 3-tonner, and then repeating the whole process backwards at the other end, and then helping Maa ‘set up’ the new home, were all enjoyed by Abhi and me with much joy and fervour.
The thing about such shifts is that they involve moving with your stuff and your people to new, exciting places (with the same stuff you’ve built and the same people you love) that hold fresh promises and opportunities. Such shifts are about the future. They are about moving out, but they are more about moving in.
That said, there is another kind, and due to the roller-coaster life I have led, I have had the unfortunate experience of being part of shifts that are about the past, which involve moving out, without either stuff you’ve built or the people you’ve come to love, to places that are not full of promise, but are looked upon with dread for what they portend and carry within their grotesquely pregnant tummies, with nary an indication of what form or matter of devilish creature was going to emerge from the depths of their black, dank, and poisoned wombs. Such shifts are more about moving on.
Indeed, I have had this harrowing experience twice already: Once, when I just about made it back from Dubai by the skin of my teeth, after having paid my debts, closed down and sold everything, and having only enough money to buy me a passage home, and the second time, when I was asked to leave by my wife of 13 years, and had only enough time (and inclination) to pack my bags with clothes, books, perhaps a bottle of liquor, my golf set, and my electronics, load it into my car, and drive off only to pull over at some random point to call my parents to ask if it might be OK for me to come and stay with them for a while till I picked up the shattered pieces of whatever it was that I had built by then.
Today, was the third time.
No doubt, this time the transition was easier, prima facie. And I had lulled myself into a false sense of security that perhaps it would be smoother on my nerves and gentler on my spirit this time around. It was nothing of the sort.
I realised how much a reset actually reset one’s life. I was looking at the list of belongings I had scribbled on a page in my to-do book and it seemed so, what’s the word for it, paltry. That list there is the distillation of my life of 50 years. Looking at it, I wondered if my life has shrunk? Or was it always this scant? This inconsequential? This pitiful? Am I reduced to this now or was it always like this? I realised I was speaking aloud. And to myself.
Suddenly, I had the urge to cry. Not like shed a tear or something, but to bawl out, full-blooded, put-it-all-out-there type of crying. Curiously, I did not. I tried. But, nothing.
Is it age? Is it familiarity, if such a thing were possible with such nightmarish experiences? Or have I become immune to this emotion because of all that I have been through? Is it that the situation is made immensely more tolerable by my mother’s unconditional love & support and my soon-to-be-ex-wife’s patience & understanding? Or is it because I am not moving very far and that Kymaia would still be literally 6 floors away from me? Is it that I have developed a thick skin and stuff like this does not affect me as much as I wish it did? Or is it that I am too tired, too fatigued, and simply have no more energy left for grieving? Whatever it is, this numbness, this feeling of feelinglessness, it is inside me, and I am unable to eject it without fearing that a rather large part of me might detach itself from my soul should I try.
My earworm since the past few days has been the song, ‘Do Not Let Your Spirit Wane’ (introduced to me by my dear friend, Karthik and shared earlier in the Sayonara post by Tasha & Girl, another labour of my love; but let us not talk of that now), which has this very intriguing line:
And it’s strange, all the things that I’ve run from
Are the things that completeness could come from
Yes. It is rather strange that while I feel my soul being wrenched from my body as I look around at empty wardrobes and bare shelves around me, everything having been torn from them, packed, and shipped to my new home just 6 floors below the old one, lying there in various stages of undress, on the floor, on the table, in crates and boxes, as if arranged by some post-modern artist wanting to make a point but forgetting what it was about midway, I also feel a weird sense of being detached from it all, like I am floating above the scene, just watching it unfold in someone else’s life, but still feeling a kind of connection to it that makes all that stuff lying about not just mine, but part of me, like how a twin may feel about their wombmate. Same, but distant. I keep thinking, ‘Isn’t this what everyone wanted? Isn’t this what everyone needed?’
And I realise I need a drink.
P.S: There are still maybe a couple of days (a week?) for me to completely shift out, and today was only the beginning. Also, the actual divorce is still a good 3-4 months away. That said, when someone is taking a saw to your throat, it doesn’t really matter how deep it is into its final cut. Every bit hurts like hell.
