A Decade

Is what it will pretty soon be after I uprooted myself from where I am these days, in Trivandrum, to move to Delhi. It is sort of hard to believe that it has been that long, or that a lot has happened since, but every now and then age and memories show up in the least expected of places and manner. It is strange to live so many different lives in the same life. Perception maybe a flawed vocabulary for expressing life, but it is the only available out there.

It is hard to believe that I once called this place home, which I still do, more as a verbal familiarity and as a preemptive strike against useless chatter than anything else. I know the places, concepts and things I am supposed to know, but beyond that there is little connect. I still need tangible artifacts from my present to trace and establish my identity. Here, shining a light inwards yields only more darkness. Some tunnels are not meant to see any light ever.

The thing about being unrooted is that you first fear it, then you fight it and then you learn to make your peace with it. It is a seismic shift in understanding that requires you to wear your inside out, destroy all protective fencing and face the day in its full glory, be it even with scorched skies and a merciless sun. To be unrooted is to have nowhere to run to. To be unrooted is to find the same answers everywhere. There is no escape, there is nowhere to hide. To be unrooted is to choose to live, even after knowing all that.

Yet, should this come across as a lament, or as a statement of ire, disenchantment or anything similar, it would be untrue. The commonality of life's 99% is intrinsically tied at the hip and soldered together with its uncommon 1%. The whole is neither this, nor that. It is just a continuum of nows that could either be common or uncommon. Light (itself fairly common) lends no value to itself till it reflects beauty (which is fairly uncommon). The other does not exist till there exists this.

That said, three years is a fairly long time spent in saying farewell. But some farewells are like that. You just cannot rush through them.