#Scurf192: Life is but an infinite scream 😱
Passing through a house here and then another 🌇 🌃
I don’t think my current apartment would want to remember me this way!
After almost five years of living in a charming ground floor, corner house in CR Park, Delhi, later this month I will move out. And when I say “charming,” I do not mean that as a placeholder for a house that just was. My house, this home, really was everything to my inert, Delhi life. But as life moves on, I had to quit, navigate and escalate to take some steps in a more hopeful direction (more on that when?!?). For now, I want to hold this space as it held me — with immense love, acceptance and endless giving; while I am still here I want to say to its still-not-chipped walls how much it has meant to me in its grandeur, deceptive spaciousness and open ambivalence.
This is not the first time I move spaces, though this time it’s a lot more to “move” out of and into. And yet none of this is making me sappy or cloying the way it should’ve, would’ve. There’s a strange sense of leaving a part of me, not a version of me back here, though. Like slipping away from oneself. As if an exceptionally brilliant dream and also one of the most entrenched nightmares.
A bit of goodness from me leaked out in the mattress of my queen-sized bed. A part of me stayed put behind like a ghost in the living room three-seater sofa. A definite sliver of me on the pot in the bathroom attached to the master bedroom. The bathroom that held the most of me together when no human person saw any of it. The longing, oh the longing!
We find soulmates in people, animals, plants. There’s spirit animals too every now and then. But as the dust in this nearly vacant house begins to settle, I am reminded of all the skullduggery I accomplished here. Perhaps this house became a soulmate? A pattern makes a person, and in this house I patterned my life. Did this house pattern me, then? As the packages pile up, old crumbs fly out from under the bed, curling up in the corners and under my feet reminding me of all the minutes I lost here. It’s here that I leave behind the melee of people that were always thronging these rooms; here that I leave behind the melee of people that made me in all these years.
I wish I could write a send off for this place in a kitsch, tacky, ironic kind of way. But that would obviously leave me with a square root of nothing. And hence this obtuse, on the nose, choice of whatever this shape of words is. This was the place that enabled me to go from being a shrinking violet in the room to someone who stopped standing at the edges of my own life. I found myself here, held on to a couple of not-so-good jobs and found one of the shiniest, most golden gigs ever! I wrote, wore myself out with the writing, read my eyes out and stared at one too many a drink accusingly.
An epiphany takes over. I bloviate with a close friend over the phone. We don’t reminisce over the past, we hate that word - but we do dredge back up all those endless drunken discourses back when we tried to find our emotional parabola, when we learnt to apply ourselves and not hold back.
I will never be back to this place, to this moment, to these corners which have housed, discombobulated and surveyed me. The walls have absorbed more than they would’ve cared to. The abyss is better stared into alone, but then there were nights when the floor was slick with all the residual remains from the night and I was better for the sharing.
“The older I get , there’s this familiarity with the pain of being human,” said Colin Farrell Irishing it in that Hot Ones episode. And I feel eerily close to being this unfillable void of need that came to define me as a person. For people like me who make ourselves despite where we come from, a house can come to mean more than just a “house” perhaps that’s why I wrote that melancholic Psyche essay about it last year. Between pitching and publishing I felt the pain of actually calling this house a “home” and Delhi my homecity?! What do these things even mean!?
I was born to a deindustrialized city in the middle of the proverbial nowhere of Hindi heartland. That place never meant anything to me, I never felt like I belonged there. After that Delhi didn’t exactly feel like a non-starter, and yet here I am soberly writing this introspective dispatch on a Monday night.
Another flood of memories take over: One of those rare house parties I put together with a lot of love and very little effort. A couple of friends smoking in the balcony that overlooks the parking lot behind this house. Deep into the night. Deeper into the 2021 winter. Our favourite cat from the time, big M, popped in through the rails to say hello. The friends startled for a beat, gave him loving pets. My two worlds colliding.
We’ll all die, and we’ll all make some mistakes. I lived here, and quite dramatically, a part of me died here. What will be left behind will be the empty landscapes, ambivalent spaces, a collection of deserted rooms where life was once lived and will thrive again. Just the cast rotates. I lived here with the force and wildness of nature alongside the “city life” that Delhi offers(ed). It was in a way one of those rare places for me where something ended, but it was also a place where something began.
Back in 2020, I came in listening to Fleet Foxes’ Shore on my bluetooth speakers. Later this month, I’ll lock the gate behind with Charli’s Brat murmuring not-so-softly in my airpods.
All I’ve leave behind is a silage of me.
Anandi is a writer.
I guess that’s all that there’s is to say.
Thanks for sharing. Beautifully written! Excited to see where you go next.