My Village Follows Me Everywhere
I moved to three cities, and it moved in with me each time.
The watchman of my Bangalore apartment building knows my grandmother's name, and that is entirely my fault.
I told him during my first week, unprompted, the way people from my village tell everyone everything, because where I come from a conversation is not finished until both parties know each other's grandmothers. He blinked at me. City watchmen are asked for parcels and blamed for parking. They are not usually handed a family tree by a woman holding two grocery bags.
His name is Munna, he is from a village four hours from mine, and now every evening he says, "Dadi ka phone aaya?" Did grandmother call. This is what I mean when I say my village follows me everywhere. I have moved three times, each move farther and shinier, and each time I opened my suitcase in a new city, the village climbed out first... and started arranging the furniture.
Every big city in this country is built out of a million village to city migration stories, stacked on top of each other like floors. Mine was supposed to be simple. Study hard, get out, become someone the village would talk about at weddings. Nobody warned me that the getting out is a single train ticket, but the leaving takes decades... and some people never manage it at all.
City one was Lucknow, for college, seventeen years old, my first mirror-walled building, my first escalator, which I stood in front of for a full minute, timing my step like it was a skipping rope. My roommate was from Delhi and said "trust me" a lot. Within a month I had learned to be ashamed of exact things: my slippers, my accent, the way I said the English word "measurement" with four syllables and a prayer.
The village showed up anyway. It showed up when I looked at the sky one July afternoon and told the girls hanging laundry, "Take it down, rain in twenty minutes," and they laughed, and nineteen minutes later they were sprinting. It showed up in my inability to eat in front of someone without offering them half. It showed up at 5 a.m., every single morning, because my body had been wound like a clock by a woman who believed sleeping past sunrise was a character flaw.
City two was Delhi, for my first job.
Delhi is where I tried to murder the village.
I paid for it, literally. Three thousand rupees to a man in Karol Bagh who ran "personality classes" above a shoe shop, where he taught a room full of us how to shake hands, how to say "absolutely" instead of "haan haan," how to flatten our vowels until nobody could tell where we were from. That was the actual promise on the pamphlet. Nobody will be able to tell where you are from.
We paid a month's rent each to become people from nowhere.
It worked, mostly. At office parties I said "absolutely." When a colleague did an impression of his "village cousin," complete with the accent, I laughed. I want to write that I only laughed a little... but I laughed exactly enough, which is worse. That night I called home and heard my own mother's accent as if for the first time, from the outside, and I felt the specific loneliness of a person who has locked herself out of her own voice.
For two years I was excellent at being from nowhere.
Then my building's water pump failed in June.
Forty flats, no water, tempers at ninety degrees. And I watched myself take over like a woman possessed by her own grandmother. I knocked on doors. I organized buckets. I knew which floor had the old couple who could not carry, and I knew it because I was the only person in the building who had ever spoken to them. I stood in the parking lot dividing a tanker's worth of water with the ruthless fairness of someone who grew up sharing one hand pump with eleven houses, and when it was done, a neighbor I had never met said, "You handle things like people used to."
Like people used to.
I went upstairs and cried... and I could not have told you whether it was grief or relief.
I thought I had left my village. I had only changed its address, and the new address was me.
City three is Bangalore, and by the time I arrived here I had stopped fighting. I greet watchmen. I feed anyone who enters my house, including the broadband technician, who now eats lunch here on installation visits, which I suspect he schedules around meals. I say "measurement" however it comes out. The village and I have settled into the arrangement of an old married couple: it embarrasses me at parties, I drag it to places it never imagined, neither of us is leaving.
Then, last winter, my grandmother died, and I took the train home for the first time in four years, and the story turned in a way I did not see coming.
The village had changed. Not slightly.
The hand pump was gone, replaced by an overhead tank. The mango tree by the school wall, under which I had learned every rumor of my childhood, had been cut for a road widening. Half the houses had new floors and locked gates, because everyone's children were sending money from cities, and money builds walls first. The boys played on phones. Nobody knew me at the tea stall. I stood in the middle of my own village and felt like a tourist holding an outdated map.
The village I had been carrying all these years, the one that made me talk to watchmen and read the sky, did not exist anymore. Not there.
It existed in exactly one location on earth, and that location was me.
I was not being followed. I was the last address.
At the funeral, the women sang the old songs, the ones for sending someone off, and I found my mouth knew every word, though I could not have written them down. On the train back, I did what I do with things too heavy to carry in silence: I wrote. A rough, unrhymed thing about hand pumps and vowels and my grandmother's name in a watchman's mouth. I posted it on a community wall for poets at two in the morning, expecting nothing, and woke up to a comment from a stranger in Toronto: "My village is in Punjab and it also lives in my elevator small talk." We have never met. We know each other's grandmothers now.
That is the part nobody tells you about new beginnings. You do not begin new. You begin carrying, and the weight is the point. The village gave me one job when it climbed into my suitcase at seventeen: remain a person people can knock for. In three cities, in three different sizes of loneliness, that has turned out to be the only skill that never once went out of date.
Yesterday evening Munna asked, "Dadi ka phone aaya?" and for the first time I had to tell him she was gone. He was quiet for a moment... Then he said he would bring me food from his room, his wife had made it, village style, and I should not argue.
I did not argue. Where I come from, you never refuse food from someone whose grandmother you know.
I ate it on my balcony, eleven floors above a city of ten million, every bite tasting of a place four hours from mine that I have never visited and knew completely. Somewhere below, a train was leaving for the north, windows lit, every seat holding someone's village.
Mine stays with me. It has seen three cities now... it is thinking of a fourth.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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