Two summers ago, at Jill's cabin, I found a book titled 'Our neck of the woods'. It was a collection of short stories about Minnesotan woodlands and how the various authors related to it. Each story, written by a different author, was a memoir, sort of, of a certain time or time period spent in or around the woods. It was a rich collection of works linking human emotions to the places where such emotions will be drawn out rather nicely. There was a particular story that attracted my attention and was easy to relate to. It mentioned how the author, while strolling through the woods, came across a yellow Iris, which is of French origin and not native American. Seeing the Iris blend in nicely with the foliage around it and the health of the plant gave the author a hope about his own situation in a new place and helped him settle down. On that bright sunny afternoon on Mille Lacs lake, I looked around, fixed my eye at a green shady patch, painted a yellow Iris into the landscape, hidden yet conspicuous to the mental eye, and sank in a little further in my own body and soul, hoping to belong someday into the land that I was sitting on.
If just the nature of things were compared, I think I would fit much better as a bird than a plant. I can't stick at one place. Every morning, I go "out" in search of needs - food, water, air, happiness - and every night, when the day is done, I yearn to go back home. My favourite quote from the Guru Granth Sahib, goes something like: He who feeds the birds and the trees, will not let you go unfed. Yet, the human mind wanders, gets lost and wanders some more, in search of a kind of fulfillment which can only be found inside one's heart.
I think my family has had a strange relationship with places. We are Sindhis - we belong to a linguistic community originating from the province Sindh,currently in Pakistan. During the partition of the country in 1945, most of the Sindhis left Pakistan and migrated to India on account of being non-Muslims. Both my maternal and paternal grand-parents, who were then in their middle-late teens, moved across the border at this time. They had moved with just bare essentials, leaving most of their wealth and property behind. They stayed in refugee housing provided by the Indian government and re-built a life for themselves from barely anything. By the time I was born, I would say my family was quite well-to-do and I am really proud of them. The wealth was no matter of luck. I have heard many-an-inspiring-story of hardships, hard work, dedication and the spirit of charity and sharing. There are two major consequences of this migration to my psyche - one is that I don't feel very attached to places (and even people actually). I think life is going to be a journey from one place to another. To call one home would only dishearten you when you find yourself away from it for what ever reason. And, let's face it, there have been quite a few reasons so far. Second is that wherever you find yourself, your values will uphold you. You will be able to build a life from scratch, if the need arises. Life is not built on past wealth, as much as on the strength of character and the set of values one possesses. Wealth is transitory, values are not. The effect of both, I think, is to detach me from places, people and objects that can be 'lost or taken away' and focus instead on building inside myself a human soul that I can rely on and carry along where ever I go.
The migration, I think, was only the first of it's kind and not the last, at least for my family. As for an example, my first trip abroad was a few months before I was born and the second, a few months after! :) This is the eleventh country that I have visited and the fourth, I can say, I have lived in. But, somehow, as the U2 song goes, "I still haven't found what I am looking for". It's not just countries, even within India, both me and my family have migrated from one place to another. What I have observed is that given sufficient time, each room that I inhibit becomes a reflection of me. In one simple word that reflection can be described as: color. Yes, color. The theme of all my rooms, all my visions of life, all my ideal self-images is color - the bright reds, and greens, and blues, and yellows...the colors that would light up any dull spot in the universe...the colors that I fell in love with when I was a little girl growing up a big house in Jaipur, Rajasthan!
It is surprising, and at the same time not so much, that wherever I have found myself, I have wanted to run away towards a vision that I have in mind of a certain other place. But, once I am there, I often find myself yearning for the times and places of the past and this yearning reflects in the way I decorate my rooms. It shows that 'at the end of the day', where I would like to be, is a mere reflection of where I have been. Home, they say, is where the heart is. But, the heart is always in the upper left side of your own body. The idea, then, is not so much to belong in a place, as much it is to belong in your own self. Therein one must find happiness and fulfillment.
