But again, those friends had their own family things to do. My own family, in my memory, at least, was always busy. But even if they weren't, they didn't do anything unifying. There is no memory in my tired mind of the family doing anything together, ever. And so when my sister no longer was my companion, I dreaded the weekends. I had no one.
Today is the first of the twins that form a weekend, a normal weekend, as opposed to the last one which was long and extended even further by my novel experience with food poisoning. And today I have no one to spend it with. There's a part of me that says, here's your opportunity to be with the most interesting person in your life, You! Then the conservative members of the parliament chuckle and say without veiled sarcasm, "But you've been by yourself the whole week, unless you count your interesting coworkers as your companions. Play golf?"
Letting the slinging of bitter words subside in the background, I went to do what I haven't been doing for two weeks: shopping. Really, I haven't gone on a major shopping trip in three weeks. And by shopping, I mean food (no more material things, striving for simplicity, remember?). I didn't know how I could have spent $169 on groceries, just groceries. I hope I will really eat them all before they rot.
Then I remember shopping with my best friend a long time ago, when we were starting to get to know each other.
The sky was blue blue blue, and even though it was as cold as last night when we drove to New York, I felt warm. Not sure why. The weather did make this boring shopping trip nicer. I was going to go to Trader Joe's, but instead of turning left, I turned right, remembering that the Indian supermarket, the only one in Southern Connecticut, was right there. So I went, and having found no legal parking space, I made my own (illegal one). I figured, in India, nothing was legally clear, so why not repeat that now in front of this Indian super market. I wanted to get just some tea for my chai.
When I went inside, my shopping trip became a trip on memory lane.
Let me preface by saying that it is a blessing and a curse that I remember things all the time. Perhaps it's because I am very sentimental. An incipient writer in high school used that word on me one afternoon (as I "remember"); at that point I didn't know that "sentimental" could have a negative connotation. Some friends say it's good that I remember all these little sentimental events. (Usually when I remember things like family and childhood.) Then there have been others, most likely some girl who had romantic troubles with me, claimed that I remember too much and for the most trivial matters.
Regardless of blessing or curse, entering that India store brought up memories. I just wanted some Assam tea grains for my chai. But when I started listening to the Hindi spoken, my heart woke up from its stupor of waiting for the shopping trip to be over.
I realized I no longer remembered the meanings of many Hindi words, but I recognized many. I turned to look at the source of the sound; it was some big celebration, probably New Year's Eve celebration, with big names like Sharukh Khan and Amitab Bachan. You might not know who they are. I didn't know who they were until I started taking Hindi and watching Hindi movies (these were the newest star and the oldest, respectively, of Bollywood).
I remember those closes.
I remember making Indian food because of India.
I remember watching our Indian cook make food for us in that stifling hot apartment.
And of course, I remember everything about India.
Last weekend, at the Nocturne, I was talking to a tango friend during the Cumparsita (that's almost always the last song played during a milonga). I suddenly found myself talking to her about the complexities of my experience in India. I wonder if I scared her off. I never really had anyone to talk to about. The girl I went there with (and for) wanted to talk to me about it, after we resumed our connection, but then, we disconnected again. When someone asked me how was India, I could say very little. It would need to be on my own initiative, because it requires that I be prepared to break down the barrier between me and that person. For some reason, that night, when the Cumparsita came up, the barrier temporarily went away between me and this friend, and I told her in the three minutes of the Cumparsita, how horrific and beautiful humanity could be, in the same place, even in the same person.
Instead of getting just the tea (and being a good quasi-Indian, I had to make several calculations on what the best tea was based on cost), I wanted to get other things. I suddenly wanted to make a traditional Indian dish, something you don't find in most Indian restaurants. Something cooked from my memory, from my still bottled up jar of searing feelings. And all the while, the Hindi words continued to pour into my head.
While the experience in India itself was fraught with problems, for some reason, being there made me happy. Picking through the exotic vegetables made me happy. Knowing what most things were made me happy. At the checkout a big, tall white man had a shopping cart full of "Microwavable Curry Chicken" made me giddy. Really, an entire shopping cart full, so there were probably about four dozens of these TV-dinners. It made me giddy that he was the only white person there. It made me giddy seeing that a white person was buying all this Westernized goods branded by an Indian company. And it made me giddy knowing that a lot of Indians would also buy this fast food, just not at such ridiculous quantity. What I have forgotten at that point was that I didn't stand out any less than he did, if we stood out at all; I wasn't really Indian.
Then a grumpy old Indian man told a clerk, who was bagging for the customers, in Hindi to open up the other register for him (without, of course, waiting for the two people standing behind me, or for me, to go first). I couldn't imagine someone doing that at the Stop and Shop I had just driven from.
So does that mean I miss India?
I don't know. I wasn't thinking about it. I was thinking, in addition to the memories, about what a coincidence it was that today, before leaving for my shopping trip, I got an email from my India companion. She forwarded a list of possible jobs to me. It was odd. She knew I was looking for a new job back in September. But that was also when we stopped talking. And when I wrote back to express my gratitude, in as few words as I could string together without sounding false and impolite, I got an instant response from her email server, indicating that she was overseas until February.
So before I went to Stop and Shop, I thought, perhaps, she had gone back to India, to finish the work that we couldn't finish when we were there two years ago. I didn't give that much thought, but perhaps it was enough to make me remember to get tea and make this little detour to the Indian supermarket.
The connection between my short detour and my remembering how lonely my weekends had been for so many years is not obvious, I know. I was in my living room sitting in my 8.5 year old futon, watching the last bit of twilight blazing and then fading behind the downtown area. I accepted that today I would be spending it alone. And the old dread resurfaced, and I felt helpless, in addition to feeling that dread. Helpless that I was going to have to spend this Saturday alone, helpless that I would have to feel the dread, helpless that life has determined that I would spend my Saturday in such a way today. But unlike the boy from the late 1980's, I knew one way to deal with this feeling of helplessness was to write. Not to write in order to complain and complain, but write about disconnections, about things that mattered, about what identifies me, even if I can't write it in a coherent manner. So I wrote another poem.
And I write this now.
Last night I told my tango buddy on our way down to the City that in the end, life reveals its simplicity when you love. Love your family, your friends, your special someone, and above all, love yourself. My sister, the one that I disconnected with in my teenage years, is now a mother. She actually read some of my blog entries and learned that I was sick. She told me she and her little boy, my favorite boy in the world, had started praying together for me, not just for my food poisoning, but in general, for my happiness. While I don't think her religion should be my way of expressing my love, she and I would implicitly agree that in the end, all you need is love. In my loneliness I forget that. In my loneliness I get angry, resentful, and I blame others for not being with me, to rescue me, and eventually I would make my way back to myself and blame me for having committed whatever sin it was that landed me in this prison of my own skin.
But love opens that up. Love was what I had seen in some of those eyes in India despite having to live in an environment thick with hatred. I look at the people I have difficulties with, and I try, in my quest for simplicity, to love them. I told my tango buddy that even if we don't have the capabilities to reach out and show these people our love, we have the capacity to love them. And so, like for this girl that I went to India for, I recognize that I have the capacity to love her, be grateful for everything in our experience together, even if I have no illusion that we would reconnect again.
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