Of homecoming

A melancholy tarmac greets me as the aircraft touches down at the lonely airport of my home town (A home town that will cease to be that in another month, but that’s another story). A fine mist of unceasing sorrowful rain has already enveloped the place as I make my way out of the airport. Homecomings, even after a 13 year gap, could be made a little less depressing, I think as I head out to the place that will host me for the next 3 days.

A sea of bobbing heads greets me as I get in, each one a little more freshly tonsured than the other. People in all shapes and sizes, from the 3-footer playing in the mud to the venerable octogenarian, look at me as if I am from another planet. The thick stock of hair is not helping the cause. Neither is my pretentiously polished appearance. Despite that, recognition and happiness dawn on some of these ancient faces, but not on mine. I try to fake it, but fail miserably at it. I don’t try again.  

Signs of decrepitude are everywhere. It is almost like nothing has changed from 13 years ago, except for a general southward heading. Plaster is peeling off, generations of moths have lived and died in what was a bulb socket in a previous life, and a glum pallor hangs about. It is not helped by the occasion, the death of the oldest inhabitant. I happen to be four generations distant, so my dim mind didn’t make the obvious connection when I first heard about it, but it is only when I reach here that I see it – the place lived with her, and after she’s gone, it has died a bit too. I vaguely recall it as a living, breathing organism from 13 years ago, but that flawed vitality is gone. It is almost fiercely decadent, standing in sharp contrast to the frenzied levels of activity all around, perhaps desirous of being frozen in time, just like its oldest denizen. Perhaps I will write about her some day, but not today. She deserves better than a melancholic ramble.

I flit around from room to room, from the terrace to the courtyard, from one conversation to another. The conversations are guilty, the tone is subdued, the eyes always downcast, and the tendency almost always to pull myself away from a setting which has too many people in it. I don’t know if I am running away from a shared past, or from a concern of the shared past creeping into my future.

I never really could comprehend the concept of a permanent address. We moved often, and so did my so-called permanent address. Arguably, if there could been a permanent address for me, it has to be this – and yet I don’t feel a connection worthy of it. The generational and physical chasm has become too distant to be bridged. I can see people around me trying to make a connection, trying to identify the part of me which potentially is a part of them as well, trying to appeal to a sense of commonality. But like a stone I stay unmoved. The cynical me justifies it with an explanation derived out of social status, but a little part of me knows that this is an appeal to a shared lineage, and the most ancient of bonds – that of a family.  

But I find myself incapable of appreciating that, just as I continue to fail miserably to appreciate the value of the good things that I have, even if I don’t deserve them. I have been a recipient of incredible luck that I don’t merit, and I continue to be an utter failure at preserving it like a treasure, which is the way it ought to be done.

That sense of failing might also explain the muddle my mind is in, which is probably why this post turned out to be such a ramble.

Perhaps I will be more lucid another day, once I learn to exercise a little more control over myself.