photo by mysza
In honor of my one year anniversary of blogging, I’m excited to share the first guest post here at SchizoFrenetic.
I’ve known Gauri since 2005; we both worked as teaching assistants to fund our graduate education. About 6 months ago she moved to Dubai and got married; these days she’s searching high-and-low for the right job in a young city.
I so liked her recent e-mail about community roots and how communities continue to evolve after you move, while your memories are more static, that I asked if could post it here for you.
Without further ado . . .
How many roots do you sprout these days?
Living for a considerable length of time in any place means you develop some roots – whether they are the gossipy woman in the neighborhood who you trust more than any designer name to get you ready for your wedding or the small, blink-and-you-miss-it falafel store that makes your mouth water even as you type this sentence out or the luxury of calling a store for groceries and having your voice recognized – that help “attach” you to that place. And maintaining those roots take time, especially if you don’t want to uproot them.
It takes time. And effort. And interest. It means keeping track of the friends, the news, and the little changes. It means taking into stride that life (and people, and cities) move on without you. I’ve realized it’s easy to freeze memories of the place you left, ziplock them into a nice air-tight package so they don’t spoil with time, but tough – not to mention disorienting – to realize that they’re not quite the same when they thaw.
Things change when you re-visit the places you’ve lived in. And if that visit is your first since you left, it can even be traumatic.
I remember landing back in Delhi after my first six months away, and finding that not only had my room become unfamiliar but that new roads (or more to the point, new detours for roads under construction) had sprouted up, throwing a spanner in my tried & tested routes – and leading me to my second encounter with the Delhi traffic police (telling him I was foreign returned didn’t seem like a good idea.)
When I first went back to los Angeles after 8 months on the other side of the country, I was put out to discover that I couldn’t locate my Indian grocery store, because it had moved to a different, bigger, location (without asking me!) or that nearly everyone was unfamilar in my school building where I couldn’t turn the corner without meeting someone I knew less than a year ago.
I am sure I will feel the same way if/when I go back to d.c. (six months and counting. . .) to the places I’ve lived, worked and claimed as my local favorites after much trial and error. I will have to see if my short-cuts, and small discoveries still work, or if the city has move on beyond recognition.
So now, I try to be prepared.
I tune into American presidential electioneering (the last guy in the white house was practically my neighbor;) I diligently read my graduate school newsletter scanning names of classmates or professors I’ve worked with; I keep up with Indian news, even as it does a remarkable imitation of a performing circus, and try to remember which political party is aligned with whom at the moment; and now that I am in the Middle East, I update myself on the local news (i.e. the sheikh’s social calendar,) culture (alcohol. club music. hindi movies) and the latest record-breaking, taste-defying construction project (see also local news.)
Gotta water my roots, afterall.
Gauri Malhotra has lived, worked and/or gone to school in New Delhi, Los Angeles, and Washington D.C. in the past 6 years. She’s currently underworked and underpaid in Dubai, UAE.
