I am a puzzle.
Parts of me are jagged; they do not fit. Parts of me are missing; I don’t know how to find them.
All my life I have tried putting myself together. Sometimes to fit the world I’m in, sometimes to understand what I am exactly.
Born in a land that was enslaved for hundreds of years, perhaps I carry those shackles in my blood. I look westwards for my future. I revel in the words of a foreign language, eschewing my mother tongue. I believe erroneously that the white man is superior, in experience and knowledge, in wisdom and intelligence.
I am a child of separation. A land cleaved into two and a marriage turned toxic. Father is a remote symbol, a picture on the wall. He is the father of the nation, but he died long before I was born. I sing his paeans in school assemblies, conditioned into mute acceptance.
Where is my own father, though? Amputated out of our lives, a stranger to me forever. It isn’t until I am in my sixth decade that I seek the answers only he could have given.
Answers for the half of me I do not understand. A body that sickens in an alien way, a mind that reacts unnaturally. Is this him? Is this the bit that lives on much after he has gone?
I am a child of a contradictory country. Rich, poor, spiritual, dissolute, innocent, corrupt, ancient, nascent. It is a land that defies description.
Caught between it all, I yearn for simplicity.
* * *
I am a woman.
Fertile, precious, yet infinitely vulnerable. Besieged for being the weaker sex in a country that prays to goddesses and burns its brides. Groped, catcalled and abused even before awareness of femininity has arrived.
My colour is a dilemma. Dark brown isn’t pretty in my town. My people worship the fair, conflating colour with virtue, assigning it supremacy, degrading all other skin tones.
I wish to flee the confines of this existence.
Escape comes in books. It comes in stories of women in faraway lands living faraway lives. Surely they are free? Freer than me, surely? They are not answerable to their families, their communities, their societies; to misogyny or patriarchy. They have to please no one but themselves. Such freedom is a dream.
I try to toe an invisible line that keeps shifting and changing. I want to belong. If belonging is a feeling, then I am six yards away from it.
Like the six yards of a sari that my mother drapes on her body. Saris made from the softest mulmul and the glossiest silks. Her only token to convention. She doesn’t belong, either. Strong, brave and outspoken women rarely do.
Perhaps my estrangement is generational. A desire to fit in when every atom of our beings conflicts with conformity.
* * *
I am a foreigner.
In the land of our former oppressors, I think I belong. In the language, the liberties, the modernity, I feel I am free. Until the same demons ambush me.
My colour, my language, my body are once again in an alien landscape. Micro aggressions show me I do not belong. How dare I believe I am an equal? How dare I try to escape the clichés of my origins?
I am an alien. I am incomprehensible. I babble, Babel-like. Babble babble in a tongue I thought was mine. Only to be met by blank faces and polite indifference.
“Excuse me?”, “Could you repeat that, luv?”, “It’s the accent, dear!”
Retreat. Isolate. Repeat.
My existence is confined to the walls of my apartment, to the walls of my office, and back again.
I am a loner. A piece of a puzzle long separated from the main. My edges are blunted and I no longer try to fit in.
Small kindnesses and friendly overtures send me into a tailspin. People who approach are confounded by my overreactions. Too much, they think, and they recoil.
Too much, too little, not enough.
Am I destined never to belong? To be adrift in an ocean of humanity and never have a safe harbour of my own?
I am muted. Automaton-like, I function, but inside I am dying inch by inch. Community, connection, cognisance, is all I desire. But it is out of reach for someone like me.
* * *
I am still alive.
There is that.
Little by little, I have settled into this little life. Everything is surface level here. No one cares enough to encroach on my freedom. I am free to live or die, as I please. And I do a bit of both each day.
Lovers come and go, friends meander through my life, family keeps its distance. Mother gone, father never found. I am an orphan, a foundling, a wanderer in search of the elusive.
I write, bleeding onto pages. I write my grief, my loneliness, my ache, my desires. This is my release; it’s my catharsis.
Slowly, I come together.
I belong here amongst words that tap out of my fingers like birds flying off branches. Amongst sentences that weave together like rivers converging. Inside paragraphs that are deep and mysterious, like the oceans of the world.
I find myself in stories. I discover myself through sentences. I create myself through characters. I mould, I shape, I scrub out. I recreate. I procreate.
This is where I belong. A place where my colour does not matter, my shape is irrelevant, my gender inconsequential, my heritage mine alone. This is where all my languages come out to play. This is where my mother tongue and my adopted tongue walk hand-in-hand. This is my release, my liberation, my homecoming.
At last, a place I can call my own.
I am a child of this earth, and I will return to her womb someday. Until then, I will live amongst books. Mine and others. For, at long last, I have found my peace, my home.
This is where I belong.
***
(This is a work of fiction)
