Life for rent

 

Have you watched Outlander? I haven’t, except for the first episode, and one scene of it stays with me. The one where Claire, the protagonist, sees a vase and has a sort of existential crisis. For that moment I felt exactly like her, she saw a vase and said this “Like the moment I realized I'd never owned a vase.
That I'd never lived any place long enough to justify having such a simple thing”.

I have no show pieces that I own, nothing that that isn’t purely functional, except maybe a few fridge magnets and gifts that I have received over the years and I carry along. I have no home so to speak of, just houses that I rent for a while. And probably no concept of one either, my parents stay abroad in a rented house, the house that they own is rented out to someone else. Also I have been staying away from them for 14 years now, cannot even call their home as mine. So where is my home?

I have lived in six different cities in the past six years. Moving everywhere permanently and staying everywhere temporarily. I gain things and friends wherever I stay and lose some of them every time I move. I attach myself to every city I move wholeheartedly, always knowing that I have to move soon. It fuels both my nihilism and hedonism every time I think about it. Nothing is of consequence because nothing is of permanence, I can make friends or be hated by my neighbors, I can buy a nice house or rent a shoddy one , buy comfortable chairs and a vase or sit on the floor; all of this does not matter because I am going to be moving soon anyways. But on the other hand it also tells me to go the extra mile to agree with people, to really try to live like a local, to see the city and try to understand it and its people, to try to grow roots; because there is nowhere else to go, no home to return to, no normal situation that I expect to come back, this is life, and right now is the only time to enjoy it.

There is perhaps no word for this feeling that I have, at least none in English or Hindi, there is one in Portuguese though – Saudade. Saudade is a sense of melancholic longing of someone or something that you liked too much and you lost, the understanding that the thing lost is permanent in suppressed but also known. Saudade is the recollection of feelings, experiences, places or events that once brought excitement, pleasure, well-being, which now triggers the senses and makes one live again. So it is sad and happy feeling at the same time, it really is hard to describe and understand except for the people who have felt this.

Every time that someone asks me where I am from, I give a different answer, depending on what I think would be easier to explain, to people here in Spain I say I am from Bangalore because that is where took the flight to Spain from. To people in Bangalore I said I am from Jodhpur because that is where I went when I was getting married, to people in Delhi I said I am from Kota because that is where I used to go on college breaks. The people that I meet while travelling here in Europe I say I am from Madrid.  I can’t speak Spanish, Kannada, Hadoti or Marwari good enough to pass for a local in any of these places though. Every city that I go to, I am an outsider. A ship without a port, so to speak. A lot of people ask me where do I want to settle down, or they ask me don’t you want to move closer to home? And I have to reply every time, where is home? My parents don’t stay in Jodhpur anyways, Kota is a place I wouldn’t want to settle down, Bangalore is going to the dogs and Madrid is too foreign to even consider. Why would anyone want to go to the city they were born in? They just happened to be born there, there is nothing magical about it, no reason to even care. Many kids are born in airplanes, ships, military camps and soon to be abandoned mining towns. They would have turned out to be ok, right? Except that everybody wants to go home. Home is where the heart is, or so they say, so perhaps you have no heart if you do not have a home.

Of course it is not all bad, I like Samosa, Kabooli, Masala Dosa and Spanish Omelette equally and can ask you to fuck off in five languages, I have houses in so many cities where I can turn up and would be welcomed into. I have a better perspective on cultures and people than some scholars of anthropology. Unlike some people I know my life is not a constant struggle to get transferred to North India or Delhi or Jaipur or any of those places. And I do not have to spend loads of money on every Diwali to go home, I utilize that on Scotch and Seekh Kababs. There is no culture that I have to carry and uphold. No lamentation that this is good but it not like home. I know I have limited time everywhere so I try to do things today rather than later on. There is nothing so emancipating like this feeling in life, except maybe very high number of Jager Bombs.

There are others like me, I see them transiting through places and life. You learn their names, say a few kind words and then prepare for a goodbye. People who are of nowhere, like the Wandering Jew cursed to wander the Earth till the second coming. People who always stay in rented houses, look for furnished houses, try to make friends with other outsiders, who struggle for coming up with address proofs and dread things that have to be posted to their permanent addresses. People who poke fun at the things that are in the city that they live and the cities that they have lived, with very less baggage, physical and emotional. Taking up prepaid phone connections, looking out for DTH boxes with less deposit and good taxi services instead of good cars. Enjoying both the city park picnics and legendary eating places. Searching for English speaking people and depending on Google maps. But the most I identify with something is the ocean, it is all one and connected everywhere but goes by so many different names and behaves so differently wherever it goes. It is Pacific somewhere and Indian someplace else, it is hot somewhere and frozen some other place, it is teeming with life at some places and also dead some other place.

It is both a boon and bane, living without a home, an anchor, belonging to nowhere, with no one to go back to and nobody holding you back. Of short visits and long promises. Enjoying the impermanence and dreading it at the same time. The life with rented houses, coolers, TVs, cars and beds. The life, itself and wholly or partly, for rent.

P.S - This is a video of Fado music from Portugal, a music which very deeply signifies Saudade

 

The girl you love or the who girl who loves you?

Are you one who has loved
With the passion of a burning fire
Or are you the one who said ‘I love you too’
And in same breath called yourself a liar

But I will stop the watch

And inanely compose such a rhyme
Knowing no one will answer, I‘d ask,
Whom do you wanna be this time?

Whom would you marry? It’s an honest question. Probably some romantic idealists would say neither, but in a world of 6 Billion people what is the probability that the person you love also found you and only you to love? Or the other way around? Very bleak I would say. And if you are saying that you don’t know the whole world then you are just compromising with the people who you know; while your soulmate (if such a thing exists) might be some other country, speaking some other language and probably 20 year older than you.

That leaves me with this question and this very real scenario. Even in the most perfect couples there is always some power imbalance, somebody who first initiated the dialogue or dropped hints at the start of the relationships; somebody who mostly makes up first after a fight; somebody who is a little insecure; somebody who got told he or she is lucky to have found the other person.

So whom do you wanna be the lover or the loved? The person who took pity on the other person because he or she has been there even after rebuttals, insults and being used & discarded. Or the other person who thinks that the other is the one who he or she was destined to be with and can’t be without? Who always wanted to take care of her and is now able to, who always wanted to be the center of his attention and cause of his smile and now finally is.  

“Through the storm, we reach the shore
You gave it all but I want more” –

U2

I think it is better to marry the girl who loves you. It makes better sense logically. You can count on her loyalty. She will always go the extra mile to please you, she will watch the movies you want, eat food you like and have sex when you feel like. She will say sorry first when you fight, go away when you are angry and come back when you need support. It is her problem to make you like her and not the other way around; she will make you look good in front of her friends, throw surprise parties on your birthday and just smile when you forget hers. And if not anything else, it is huge ego boost to have someone doting on you so much.

Maybe you will someday fall in love with her, or at least you can tell yourself that. Ayn Rand had said that you need reasons to love someone. And whole hearted and blind love is a good reason as any. Any which ways you will get fond of her or at least dependent on her after you continue long enough. Hell you even start liking your dog that has been with you for 3 months, she is after all a human being. Least you can do is give her attention and an occasional act of kindness. Many people don’t even get that, and for most that is enough from the people they love. It will keep them satiated. One sided lovers have second -hand lives. They derive theirs from their lover; their happiness, their self-worth, their sense of purpose and their gratification. It is not a bad life if you ask me, for them I mean. They get happiness out of it and some distortion of a companionship. It is more than what half of the world is living with. And it certainly beats the bitterness, sarcasm and brewing but implicit hostility that is between many couples who never had or don’t have any love for each other anymore. But most of all you are not giving her the pain and heartbreak that someone gets when the love of their life leaves them. Many can’t get over it their entire lives and a few end it. It is the biggest favor anyone can do anyone if you ask me.

“Sleight of hand and twist of fate
On a bed of nails she makes me wait
And I wait without you” –

U2

Marry the girl you love and you will be playing catch-up your whole life, it is like the deer who runs for a pool of water in the desert and the farther he runs, further the pool of water of gets away from him. Sooner or later the deer dies of the thirst and exhaustion he accumulated running for that pool of water. The pool of water is a mirage, an illusion, something that is there somewhere but you will never find it, and that search will kill you in the end. The deer would have been better off if he had never started running for that water in the first place. Likewise is the love you would never get. It is a tough life, because no matter how much would you do for her, it would never be enough, the constant nagging that if I would have done that or done that better, she would love me back will kill you sooner or later. And if that doesn’t, the insecurity will; every late night, every afternoon lunch without you, anytime when her whereabouts are not known, every time she run towards the phone when it rings, every time she smiles at some stranger will drive a million daggers through your heart. Gregory David Roberts had once written – “Some loves are like that. Your heart starts to feel like an over-crowded lifeboat. You throw your pride out to keep it afloat, and your self-respect and your independence. After a while you start throwing people out - your friends, everyone you used to know.   And it’s still not enough The lifeboat is still sinking, and you know it’s going to take you down with it.” Whom do you wanna be when then boat goes down? Rose or Jack? Trust me there is nothing sadder than one half of a great love that will never be.

I am a Nihilist, ontologically.  I don’t think life has a higher purpose. After we are gone there is nothing, we are ashes or dust. There is no greatness in self-sacrifice, morality, doing good for others, life is as Friedrich Nietzsche said “Regarding life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is worthless.”  But before that I am a hedonist, I believe that pleasure is the only intrinsic good. In very simple terms, a man is only goal is to strive to maximize net pleasure (pleasure minus pain). So what do you think will bring you the maximum pleasure? Of course marrying the girl who loves you.

And finally. Why do I ask this question? I don’t know. It is a good question to be asked. And I like Yossarian am a ‘collector of good questions’. For the most part I think it is habit of abyss gazing, and to quote Nietzsche again “And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” Of these two girls, I have none. And I had both. And what would I do? I would marry the girl I love. But then … I’m an emotional fool.

“There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness” –

Friedrich Nietzsche

P.S. - If you bothered to read through 1275 words and 1300 whites spaces please do bother to leave a comment, I want to know what people feel about this whole affair.

Night

“Nights are too good to just sleep through them” – Anirudh Singh Chauhan

There is something strange and mystifying about the night. It makes the most ordinary sub-urban residences look like the den of most sinister crimes and fornication. Lonely street lamps cast long and dark shadows. And pipes become snakes, bushes become monsters and the old watchman is the cloak and dagger.

The night makes me realize the triviality of ourselves. Just as the street lamp is a small speck of light fighting a losing battle with the omnipresent darkness coming in from all sides to engulf it. Same is the case with us; we are just tiny specks in the big universe trying to sustain ourselves through the play of cosmic forces in whose plans we don’t even figure.

Then the sound of a wailing siren of an ambulance rips through the shroud of silence in the night; unrelenting and inconsolable, like a mother who just lost her child. Someone somewhere is dying. Someone somewhere is beating his wife in these nice quaint houses, someone somewhere is getting drunk to force himself on his girlfriend behind those pretty curtains, someone somewhere is wishing for his mother-in-law never to wake up from her sleep in those spic and span houses. Because that’s what man is. A predator; and night is the time for predators to come out. Night is to man what the grass is to the viper. The grass sways with the wind, is soft to touch and is easily trampled underfoot; but it the grass that hides the viper till he comes close enough to strike.

But that is only the part of the charm of the night. It shows you the pretty moon and twinkling stars which the sun hides from you every morning. But the night is also concealing, it respects your privacy. The night is quiet, it respects your peace. And most of it all it is adjusting; it only lets you see what you want to see. Somewhere in this night only a woman is sleeping in the embrace of her soulmate convinced that no sorrow can touch her. Somewhere in this same night a kid is burning the midnight oil, sacrificing his tonight convinced that it’ll bring him a better tomorrow. And somewhere through this same night a man is driving towards his loved ones convinced they’ll never be apart again. Night is to man what a shield is to a Knight. It protects him of the brutality and the sword of his day life.

But most of it all night is to man what day is to the earth. It makes us possible to make sense of him. There are no masks, no pretentions in the night. No makeup, no corsets, no suits to hide behind. Nobody to keep up the facade for, no approvals to take for his actions, no opinions to be formed by his speech. The night doesn’t conceal anything about a man, it reveals it. In the dark man is his true self.