I Moved to the City With One Suitcase
Everything I owned fit in twenty kilos; everything I feared didn't.
The night before I left home, my mother weighed my entire life on the bathroom scale and told me to remove two kilos of it. The airline allowed twenty. My life, apparently, came to twenty-two, and the extra two kilos were books, which tells you everything about me and also why my father was not speaking to me.
I was twenty-four. I had quit the bank job it took my family three temples and one recommendation letter to get me, and I was moving to a city eleven hundred kilometers away to work at a small publishing house for a salary my father called, with impressive restraint, pocket money.
He did not come to the door when the taxi arrived. My mother stood there doing the thing mothers do, touching my face like she was proofreading it. My younger sister took photos. Somewhere behind the curtain of his room, my father coughed once, deliberately, his entire farewell address.
So: one suitcase. Maroon, hard-shell, one wheel with a limp, a wedding gift from 1998 that had until then only traveled to weddings. Inside it, folded with military grief by my mother: four shirts, two trousers, one towel, a pressure cooker so small it could only cook for one person or one very disciplined couple, eighteen kilos of decisions and, buried under everything, the two books I smuggled back in when she left the room.
You learn something brutal when you pack your life into twenty kilos. You learn what you actually are. Not the person in your head, with the vinyl collection and the aesthetic. The real one.
I was four shirts and a small pressure cooker.
It was the most honest I had ever been with myself, and it happened at a weighing scale.
The city received me the way cities receive everyone: without noticing. My room was a third-floor box with one window facing a wall, which is a metaphor I did not need at that point in my life. The first night, I ate biscuits for dinner because I could not find the courage to ask the tiffin aunty downstairs how tiffins worked. I was a man who had left home to be brave and could not negotiate dal.
The suitcase stayed open on the floor for two months... Not because I was lazy. Because closing it and sliding it under the bed felt like admitting I lived here now, and unpacking it fully felt like admitting the same thing, so it sat there... half-alive, a maroon mouth I stepped over every morning.
Everything I owned had fit inside it. Everything I feared had traveled cargo-free. Fear of failing publicly in front of a father who predicted it. Fear that the boy who read too much was not the same as a man who could build something. Fear, at 3 a.m., with the wall outside my window lit orange by somebody else's balcony bulb, that courage was just stupidity that had not received its results yet.
The loneliness of those months had a taste. Instant coffee, mostly, and the specific silence of a phone that lights up only with recharge offers.
Courage is not the leap. Courage is the eleven hundred kilometers after the leap, cooked one small pressure cooker whistle at a time.
I started writing at night because the room was too quiet not to. Small things. Lists that turned into paragraphs. One night I found a page of prompts for poets and one of them said, write about an object that is waiting. I looked at the open suitcase on my floor and wrote for two hours without stopping, and at the end of it I was crying over a maroon hard-shell like an absolute fool, because it turned out I had not written about the suitcase at all...
I had written about my father.
Here is the turn, and I still do not fully have language for it.
Four months in, the publishing house delayed salaries. Rent was due. I had 1,743 rupees, a number I will remember at my own funeral. I sat on the floor and finally, properly, emptied the suitcase to see if there was anything I could sell, which is a sentence I never thought my life would contain.
Under the lining, in the zip pocket nobody ever uses, there was an envelope.
Not my mother's handwriting. His.
Inside: six thousand rupees in old hundreds, soft as cloth from being counted many times, and one line on a torn piece of his office notepad. No greeting, no name, because greetings and names are feelings and my father does not traffic in those. Just one line in his tilted Hindi: The pressure cooker whistles three times for rice. Do not call your mother for everything.
He had packed it the night he was not speaking to me. He had coughed behind that curtain having already hidden money in my suitcase like a man planting a tree he refused to be seen watering.
I called home. My mother picked up. I asked for him, which I never did. There was shuffling, the TV volume went down, and then his voice, suspicious as always, as if the phone itself might be selling him something. I said I found the envelope. Long pause... Then he said, so the lining finally tore, that suitcase was always cheap, and hung up... before either of us could be caught feeling anything.
That is my father's entire love language: logistics.
I did not spend the six thousand. Rent got sorted, salaries arrived, I learned the tiffin aunty's system and eventually her son's board exam schedule. But the envelope stayed under the lining where he put it, and it is still there today, three years later, in the suitcase under my bed in a better room with a window that faces actual sky. Some money is not money. Some money is a cough behind a curtain, finally translated.
The city and I are on speaking terms now. I know which platform the 8:40 leaves from and which uncle at the corner shop lets you owe him. The publishing house pays on time and lets me read manuscripts by first-time writers, and once in a while I get to call a stranger and tell them yes, and hearing their voice change is the closest thing my job has to a festival. The loneliness still visits, but like a relative now, on occasions, not like a tenant.
And the writing never stopped. The suitcase poem went through eleven drafts and became the first thing I ever sent to a monthly poetry contest, hands shaking over the button like it was a detonator. Later I wrote about that first orange-lit winter for a collection on new beginnings, and I read other people's versions of my own story, hundreds of them, everyone with their own maroon suitcase, everyone with their own coughing father, and understood I had never once been as alone as I believed at 3 a.m.
People ask sometimes if it was worth it, leaving everything for one suitcase and pocket money. Wrong question. I did not leave everything.
Everything I owned fit in twenty kilos.
Everything I needed, it turns out, was hidden in the lining by a man who could not say goodbye, and hope weighs nothing at the airport. They never even check.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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