Last night I returned to the little city from New York by train. It was packed full for some reason. It was quite early for the Nutmeg people to be coming back from New York without a fancy dinner in the magical Big Apple. I had to sit somewhere, so I asked this lady if she could move her stuff to make space for me in the seat next to her.
I recognized the font on first chapter of the book she was reading. I couldn't recall where I had seen it from. But as soon as she got off the phone, talking about some plans to meet strangers (I overhear people talk, and remember a lot too), I saw the cover of the book. I was relieved the suspense was over.
Before I commented on that book with this stranger, I looked at her. Yes, I was listening in on what she was saying and observing her. Rude? Probably. But she was sitting next to me, and to deliberately blank out of her half of the conversation would be insincere, though I suppose I didn't have to observe her.
She was some Indian or South Asian woman, in her mid or late thirties. She didn't seem married, which is surprising always to me from Indians, but then again, I do know two Indian women from the cities who, like their counterparts in the West, choose in one way or another, to remain unmarried. She looked a little, well, unstable. And talking to her reaffirmed it. I don't mean she would take out a knife and start stabbing the passengers, starting with me, just that in her voice, in her mannerism, in the way she chose to put makeup on, belied nervousness.
And so when she started telling me about peacefulness of the soul, the need (need?) to live for the moment, that we are just experiences, I thought, wow, you're going through something, I know. She has been traveling around, hopping from one city, one continent, to another. If I have sound condescending, I am not trying to. I admire her for more reasons than the quibbles I have made. She started writing four years ago, and before that, poetry. While her background is in "International Relations Studies", for some reason, she found writing the experience of living more interesting and fulfilling than doing international work or study. She told me a little about the book she's been working on for the past four years, a book about three women, focusing on their period at the age of eight, woven in the complexities of seven superstitions in South India. She's now looking for a bigger publisher than the British one she had found. That was the reason she was going to Stamford, where I work, to meet a friend to discuss other publisher possibilities.
I enjoyed talking to her. It was, as is most of the case in my life, mostly about her. I could sense that she was someone who had a lot to talk about. I watched the dynamic expressions on her face as her words weaved through them like a motorcycle in the snaking roads of a mountain. Her eyes were dark, darker than her skin. She was almost gaunt, her face, being of the First World, stretched back as if it were one of the slum-dwellers in her native land. She spoke slowly, almost in a poetic way. I asked her a hard question to which she didn't succeed in asking. I asked her what her words in the book sounded like. The best she could say was "poetic". But I wanted more. Poetic is how Garcia Marquez's work sounds. But it's also how the book she was reading sounds. The words flow like quiet streams through a variegated landscape. Never in a hurry, but always carrying the ideas of the path and reaching inevitably to the sea that is the reader's own pool of ideas.
I enjoyed talking to her because she was an emerging "writer." She explicitly said she wasn't a "writer". She said she was simply writing about "experience". I think we are made of experience, but we aren't exclusively a flesh and blood bag holding these experiences. I enjoyed seeing how her path has been becoming a "writer." It was good to see that being a writer isn't only about running around looking for publisher, making money, making a name, winning contests to make that name. It was good to hear her fantasizing and loving her ideas materialize into more than a hundred thousand words, hopefully in print, soon.
She knew a little about me, the most important piece of information was that I was in Lucknow, Northern India, far from the beaches of her native land. She enjoyed hearing what I had to say about India. I have mentioned before that it is always a difficult subject, but a subject I am always "happy" to share with anyone who cares to listen. And perhaps that was another reason I enjoyed talking to her. I don't connect well with most Indians, and not Indian women in particular. There are plenty of Indians in my company, not surprisingly since the grand prize for Indians is landing a job in finance, usually through some route related to IT. (The second prize is usually taxi driving. Sounds like a mean stereotype, but you can go to India's Punjab province and find out for yourself.) Indians in America are very family oriented, their lives very much set, predictable, and it's what they want having lived in a legacy of so much sorrow and poverty that remains today in their native land. Indian women who succeed in their careers here often don't move too much away from their traditional role. These assessments are not unique to the Indian immigrants, but they are an explanation why I don't connect with them well; they are too close to what I want to get away with, a simple life, a stable life, a life so close to tradition.
But every now and then I meet someone that stands outside the stereotype. A woman we met in India was like that. She was a single mother (unheard of anywhere in that land of a billion people); she was struggling to make a living from her private business that aimed to help local artists; she was very well-traveled. Here's a woman who is always traveling. The last thing she told me before getting off the train was, with a bitter-sweet expression, saying how good and bad it was to be traveling all over, to have no roots, just as it was good and bad to have roots. I knew what she meant. That's often my own struggle. Not only with traveling geographically, but in my internal world.
I had a nice day in New York before that. I went to have brunch with my host in a very nice section of Long Island City. And despite the rain I walked around to see if it's a place I wanted to live. I then went to the Met, saw some exhibits, and even did my own drawing of some of the ancient Southeast Asian sculptures. But sitting there, I couldn't help noticing how alone I was. Most people were with someone. I didn't see, actually, anyone, like me, alone. There's something precious about being free, free to go to whichever street I chose, whichever section of the museum I had a desire for, free to be spontaneous and decided to draw the sculptures. But the heart was not altogether in agreement. I looked at the couples around me, snapping stupid pictures of beautiful art they neither understood nor would care to review the photo of, and wondered if they had the misfortune of debating about the merits of being alone. And here was a woman who probably felt the same way. She was going to see a friend to talk about business.
I have friends too. A friend called me up and when she found out I wasn't staying in New York to dance, she nearly begged me to stay. I was touched. I have friends who cared about being with me. There's something beautiful about caring to be with someone. It's one thing to care about someone's health, someone's happiness. But it's a different thing to care about being with that person, to share an experience with that person. Friends do that for me, even if in the end, like yesterday, I couldn't. I couldn't bear to be alone in a city where I didn't want to be alone. I'd rather go home and be alone in a city where I have been alone. And before I could dig myself deeper in self-pity, this woman reminded me that it isn't always bad to be alone. In the end, whatever experience it is, cherish it, write it down, and if you're lucky, publish it and make some money.
The book she was reading she had been trying to read for years now. It wasn't a good book. I started out our conversation by saying, "Oh, that's a 'cute' book." It's a superficial book. A fast book. It's a New York Time's Best Seller, though I am sure if the New York Times did review it, it wasn't a good review. It was a soul-searching cute story about a woman who decided to break her husband's heart into pieces with a divorce that wasn't rooted in anything conventional, only that she no long was in love with him or the idea of being trapped in a boring marriage. So she escaped her life in New York and went binging in Italy, searching for peace in India, and rediscovered love in Indonesia. Yes, it's really that cheesy, but still, cute to read. And I could see why it was so popular for the wealthy people of the world who have not figured out what living meant. (The movie based on the book was a thousand times worse.)
The woman in the book, however, does remind me that being alone isn't a terrible thing. And it is only when you have come to peace with yourself, to some peace, at least, that you no longer have to worry about being alone, and for some reason, then, you are discovered.
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