The Charm of Remote Places— % &Living in a remote place is a trait. It is a call for freedom. It lets you visit everyone, but deters everyone from visiting you. You practise this while travelling, where you choose the remotest village in a popular hill station be it Naddi in Dharamshala, Bhattu in Bir or Burwa in Manali.— % &You practise this in urban spaces as well. You could have very well chosen to live in Indiranagar or Koramangala but knowing how frequently people you know visit those places, you chose to reside in the downmarket Kaggadaspura. Nestled in the backyard of DRDO campus where once Dr. Kalam lived and worked, it doesn't come on the way to any of the hotspots in Bangalore. It is not too far out of Bangalore to become a weekend getaway for those known to you, nor is it near enough for anyone to frequent regularly. It offers you freedom to socialise when you want to, not when others want.— % &You don't hate people. In fact, you're a great host and love having friends over, whom you cook for and cook with. But there's a caveat: you're a great host when you invite your friends, not when they arrive unannounced. You conserve your social energy and draw enough mental bandwidth to accommodate the thoughts and breaths of another person in your space. An uninvited guest gives you as much anxiety as a phone call without prior intimation over text. You desire a sweet little heads up all the time, to prepare yourself to be attentive and not zone out into your own thoughts, which you often find much more interesting than others. Perhaps, that's why, your best friends and most compatible partners are those who like to zone out together with you. They are as lost, or as engrossed in their own thoughts, as you. You can spend eternities with them.— % &Your ears pop out in fright when you hear real estate companies have started calling your beloved Kaggadasapura as Greater Indiranagar. You don't want its tiny buildings to be replaced with apartment complexes, housing hundreds of families, half a dozen of them known to you. You like the anonymity inside your modest three-storeyed apartment with no lift. There's no security, there's no MyGate, there're no cries and croons of kids. A bunch of bachelors or single parent with high-school going kids live there, minding their own business, not egging to get to know you better, not urging the apartment residents to gather together for a Holika Dahan, Dussehra or a Christmas festivity. You have your friends for that.— % &This overfamiliarity, familial banter and neigbourly love have bothered you for a long time. You look back on the people you dated and you realise how you got bored of everyone who was very close to their families. Those who couldn't stop talking about their chachis and mamis and tens of thousands of cousins and their relationships and weddings are history. You have only gotten along with those who aren't dearly attached to their extended family. Only those survived whose loved ones started and ended at their parents and maybe cousins of the same age. You couldn't stand seeing your future as someone attending weddings of their distant cousins. You wouldn't be able to fake interest in that future, so you cut it short in the present.— % &You're so asocial that you detest overenthusiastic pets too. You have never been a dog person, but of late you have been open to cats. You get them. You're a cat yourself, you think. You detest non-consensual touch, even from your partner. You like getting scratched more than getting mollycoddled. Your ideal partner is one who lets you be by yourself. Someone who doesn't demand for your attention all the time, who respects your free will to dote on them when you feel like. Someone like a cat, basically.— % &Your friends, the ones who remain despite you, get you. You're not too close with any of them. They know your greatest confidant is writing, and all your doubts and fears and peculiarities and idiosyncrasies are most honestly shared in words with the larger public. You don't care about privacy. You think of yourself as a writer and your life as a larger novel that is happening to you. You will reveal it all one day anyway, so you don't guard your secrets, you don't shy away with what you're feeling. Either about yourself or anyone else. Two or three close friends who are there, they know how you cherish your space and how blatantly truthful—and hurtful you can be. They are understanding and forgiving enough to let you be. You love them.— % &Like a routine, every year, you make sure you're not in Bengaluru on your birthday. You religiously spend your birthdays in remote places away from family and friends. You don't want someone to go overboard and do things for you. It will make you feel obligated and you can't ever do the same for them. Because you don't feel as strongly about them or birthdays. You like your quiet and your space, and like to spend it with new friends made at a new place (with less obligation). If you're feeling sociable, you surprise your parents on your birthday and you take out for dinner at a fancy place. With parents, you don't fret it. You anyway are obligated for their lifetime of struggles and sacrifices. — % &But a part of you also thinks your parents' sacrifices aren't your responsibility. It was their choice to have you. To give you birth and to raise you. You, in your own right, don't want to commit the same mistake. You feel children are the most ungrateful fuckers to ever exist on this planet, because you think you're one. And you don't want one such addition in your life, stealing your freedom in exchange of little joys here and there. You'd much rather spend that time with a friend's kids, teaching them about birds, music & words. You'd anyday prefer being a teacher than a parent. It gives you the ability to switch off unlike parenting, which is full-time.
This musing started out to depict the charm of remote places but it became more about you, who feels that charm. It was destined, you believe, because it takes a remote person (in feelings, in attachments) to truly cherish the charm of a remote place. Else, the homesickness and responsibility towards one's family will not allow you to stay long enough to feel its charm.— % &-
After spending a year frequenting parks once every week, you realise parks aren't enough. You need a frigging forest.
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The New Place— % &After a few days in the mountains, you have found a routine.
You wake up, make your bed, brush, do a few rounds of surya namaskar, make breakfast, go for a long walk with binoculars in hand to spot new birds. You return quenched, bathe and sit down to work. You take a break, go for a short hike exploring the village, get groceries on your way back, cook dinner, video call your parents and then read 50 odd pages of a book you're carrying or watch a series to sleep.— % &You like how travelling away from home has forced you to pick and choose. You're no more spoilt for choices. Instead of some seven hundred books at home demanding your attention, here, you have brought just two. One brand new novel titled My Beloved Life by Amitava Kumar and one decade old bildungsroman titled Boyhood by Coetzee.
Instead of doing akkad-bakkad to choose which instrument to play among the two dozen in your Bangalore home, here you have only got your saxophone to indulge in. Lack of choices helps bring focus. And focussed attention feels a lot like love. You love the novel you're reading. You love playing the saxophone—its continuous baritone floats in the mist. And you love spotting a new bird.— % &You have fallen in love with almost every new thing around you—the new trees, the new birds, the new weather, so much so that it is making you want to write everyday. You want to record what you see, what you feel. For yourself. Writing brings you joy. More than joy, it provides a sense of rootedness despite your recent uprooting.
Writing elongates the time spent in this new place. It makes you live twice, once in real, once in retrospect, relived with the wisdom of the day. Writing about a long day as the day ends is quite like writing a story after knowing how it would end. You know what comes next, so you shift your focus on how every little thing happened. Why did you do something that you did? How did it make you feel? These are essential questions for writing to answer. Writing allows you to slow your thoughts, collect them and not let them meander until they complete their journey. A complete thought adds meanings to moments and memories. Perhaps that's why, more than any person, you have always considered writing as your teacher. — % &One evening, three days since you moved to the new place and when you're not writing, reading, cooking or working, you hear a familiar knock on your door. You find loneliness standing there, holding its helpless smile. It's the same loneliness that became the resident guest inside of you back in Bangalore. No amount of socialisation solved it. Not even the old friends. Nor love. The only respite came in riding your Enfield away from Bangalore towards Kolar or Devanahalli. You felt it was the big city's tight hold which made you feel lonely, and tired of biking away only to return every once in a while, you booked your tickets away from Bangalore, hoping loneliness would be left behind. But somehow, it sneaked into your backpack and now, in this new place, it makes its presence felt once in a while.— % &Yesterday, when loneliness showed up, you called a dear friend in Bangalore, and complained about how the new place didn't solve your restlessness. How you're carrying loneliness in you, as if a parasite. How it makes you feel existential every now and then. How you feel jealous of people entrenched deep in their jobs or family life to not be bothered by it. How kids and jobs are ways to keep one distracted from the sheer grief of everyday living. Back in Bangalore, you had found your distraction—in friends, in their company and in their banter. But between busy friends and busier Bangalore, the city won the battle. When loneliness arrives, it needs an immediate cure. Friends weren't available in those times and the city got to you. So much so that you escaped. For good, for newness to become the cure.— % &Newness helped but not completely. The new place has everything new that you like except for its new people. You resent not knowing anyone deeply. You miss friends here. Not anyone in particular, but friendship in particular. A friend to talk about this loneliness with, a friend to make sense of it with. It is then you begin writing. You write and you feel listened to. You feel lighter. You hear loneliness leaving.— % &You realise you moved to the new place not for its newness alone, but for rediscovering the old friend that is writing inside of you. You wonder why you didn't write as much in Bangalore. Maybe because there were other options to escape the loneliness than writing. You could escape the city on your bike there. You could escape your company with the company of your friends. In the new place, there're no tiny escapes. The only escape from the new place is going back to the big city. Maybe, you escaped to the new place so your options of escape could be limited. Because it's only when you can't escape, you write.
In writing, you have found the greatest company. Perhaps that's why, in writing, you have found the greatest escape. — % &-
1. Escaping your present won't help you find peace.
2. You're enough.-
The first thing that changes when you move to a new place is your relationship with the night. Especially if you love walking.— % &The unfamiliarity of the new place is more pronounced at night, when you can't notice much. It makes you want to come back home by dusk. Like I did yesterday.
I moved from Bangalore to a village in McLeodganj two days ago & I felt scared being outside when it went dark. The unlit roads, the howls of dogs (or wolves?), and to add to that, the rampant presence of leeches and snails (and snakes!) did no good to my uprooted soul. I had to spray salt on my ankle to disentangle the leech that clawed on my skin during an afternoon hike yesterday. The first feeling was fright, but soon, it was curiosity. I dislodged it before it could sink its teeth in my skin. I then watched it crawl away to find newer skin to quench its bloodthirst. — % &With every passing day, the place becomes more familiar. Like today, I lingered outside for a little longer. The sun had set and faraway houses on hills twinkled—a shapeless constellation, while I marched through the woods.
What gave me this courage? Known faces, for one. The nearby grocery shop owner is no more a stranger. We greeted each other when I went to buy milk & bread. And second, wearing shoes in place of slippers, this time, really bolstered my confidence. In your face, leeches!— % &When unfamiliar becomes familiar, night turns into a day. I can't wait to go for a late night stroll post dinner, or a midnight bike ride, like I used to in Bengaluru. Until that happens, I'm going to push for a few extra minutes every time I go for an evening walk. And I shall document and share new findings about being human. Bear with me, until there's an actual bear with me. :)— % &-
Little did I know that when I started spotting old cars on the road, I was preparing myself for something more immersive, something more elusive. Birds.
The year-long training of my eyes to peer into every nook and alley while on the move in search of a rustic headlight or a rundown taillight has been immensely helpful in birding. I gape with the same intensity, same curiosity. While it is easy to spot the steel mudguard or the three-lettered number plate of a stranded Fiat in just one look, birds need more work. It starts with an auditory clue. I follow the chirps, through branches & trees, to find them unsuspecting, busy by themselves.
In both cars and birds, I know only a little. I need to Google a lot, which is my teacher. But there's one fundamental difference between the two. When I see a pretty old car, I feel proud of my discerning eye. I congratulate myself for spotting it, and mutter kudos to its owner for not selling it to a scrap dealer. But when I spot a new bird, I only feel grateful. My sense of self dissolves. I don't even feel like taking a picture. I just remain transfixed, an aware witness to the fluttering bundle of joy in front of my eyes.-