London represented a beautiful subtlety in its people. They were not cold and stand-offish, they were abrupt and without congenial courtesy, yet polite and so adept at reading you before you understood that you had reacted already. They were trying to help you before you opened your mouth to form the call.
My strong intuitive manner of looking at the world and people was delighted to feel the air crackling with glorious-oh-glorious awareness at every interaction. My more reserved aspect bristled at people being able to detect what I was trying to hide, but I waded into the depths with my usual reckless abandon. If I did not step into the water, I would not feel that delicious lick, slurp, uncontrolled bobs and dips as the current immersed me and washed me off to unexplored perches.
What surprised me the most was the richness my cultural identity lent me. Australians and South Africans stopped themselves from hugging me in teary happiness. Indians and Pakistanis had only one question: Are you from India? Africans proclaimed knowledge of my being African from when they first set eyes on me. Turks and Egyptians slipped me free sandwiches with a salaam and demi-discussions about taqdeer (fate). In a foreign land, my wealth was my actual locality. The irony baffled me at first.
Every moment that we spend breathing and alive, we spend assessing change. We cannot anticipate the whims of Fate nor the quirks of our environments and the people in it. And, so, we are ever contemplating breaks in our expectations of our surroundings. And fighting the fear of these new expectations seeping, inevitably, into our beings and souls. For me, my last three years were such a battle - with its move to new dominions and new domiciles.
In all honesty, this battle is actually perpetual for one who navigates between new cultures, new sub-cultures, new people, new places - regardless of the distance travelled. Granted, that a new domicile forces one to engage in this battle, but this battle is a choice we make irrespective of the distance from our hometowns. I believe it is a powerful choice because it breaks that rooted self-confidence we have in our intelligence. In our values and beliefs, as well. If we rarely challenge these, we slowly start walking those bone-breaking gyres, unknowingly and, perhaps, forever.
My strong intuitive manner of looking at the world and people was delighted to feel the air crackling with glorious-oh-glorious awareness at every interaction. My more reserved aspect bristled at people being able to detect what I was trying to hide, but I waded into the depths with my usual reckless abandon. If I did not step into the water, I would not feel that delicious lick, slurp, uncontrolled bobs and dips as the current immersed me and washed me off to unexplored perches.
What surprised me the most was the richness my cultural identity lent me. Australians and South Africans stopped themselves from hugging me in teary happiness. Indians and Pakistanis had only one question: Are you from India? Africans proclaimed knowledge of my being African from when they first set eyes on me. Turks and Egyptians slipped me free sandwiches with a salaam and demi-discussions about taqdeer (fate). In a foreign land, my wealth was my actual locality. The irony baffled me at first.
Every moment that we spend breathing and alive, we spend assessing change. We cannot anticipate the whims of Fate nor the quirks of our environments and the people in it. And, so, we are ever contemplating breaks in our expectations of our surroundings. And fighting the fear of these new expectations seeping, inevitably, into our beings and souls. For me, my last three years were such a battle - with its move to new dominions and new domiciles.
In all honesty, this battle is actually perpetual for one who navigates between new cultures, new sub-cultures, new people, new places - regardless of the distance travelled. Granted, that a new domicile forces one to engage in this battle, but this battle is a choice we make irrespective of the distance from our hometowns. I believe it is a powerful choice because it breaks that rooted self-confidence we have in our intelligence. In our values and beliefs, as well. If we rarely challenge these, we slowly start walking those bone-breaking gyres, unknowingly and, perhaps, forever.
The commercial travel industry (and the NGO industry) has sold us a solution to this: Travel to distant lands. Displace yourself geographically and you will NEVER walk that horrid gyre. Horror and shock, the blurb seems to imply. Horror and shock and fear, we immediately respond, before we comprehend what the gyre is, what our gyre is. In the meanwhile, we dash off to foreign lands every Easter and Christmas; we congratulate ourselves on our travel ages surpassing our actual ages; we beam righteously when others flatter our pasty skins with healthy, eastern european tans and we still don't actually know what that gyre is for us. Nor whether we need to escape our gyre or not.
I had left my homeland knowing its beauty lie in the diversity of its people and their secret cultures; for these cultures had not yet recorded themselves in sustainable artforms and literature. We had not yet begun to celebrate ourselves - we concentrated instead on being the world's gateway to Africa. And gatekeepers must remain neutral. I had then taken myself to a place that celebrated its culture and diversity formally and, perhaps, imposed its expressions on the world. And I had to yearn for the unshinied, un-stereotyped expression Africa had.
Though, something not celebrated is something soon overlooked. And so, I returned with a grimace as I noted the backlash this lack of recognition had caused. Malema dominated the newspapers with his foibles, in a slight of irony. Politicians and prominent businessmen mirrored his cries of "colonial oppression", "black men must not be white men's dogs", "taking care of your dog is a white man's thing" (more recently). I heaved a loud sigh for my country.
"Know thyself," said Aristotle.
This beauty we have, it is beyond our tribes and skin colours and rituals. This beauty that is so deep that we cannot capture it in a travel catalogue, we are losing it. I don't know why. But we are throwing it away. When we have so much to give to the world. We do not know ourselves.
**************
The title "Gyre Pyre" is a loose reference to the irony that I felt to be a part of Hinglish. As a child, I had mistaken this play of words to be a silly, unsophisticated humour, but my ear has never been trained to a sophisticated level of Hindi nor a sophisticated level of bilingualism (in spite my exposure to multiple languages). Expat Indians living in the UK were often as well read in English as they were in Hindi. And I noticed that as we learn more depth about a new subject, we begin playing with the concepts until we are able to contribute to the subject. A ghost of the scientific processes Da Vinci, Copernicus, Lady du Chatelet, et al, used as they worked their ways to epiphanies.
(I excuse the six Delhiite rapists who gang-raped and killed a 23 year old physiotherapist in December 2012 from this praise. They're more than a tad psychotic. )
