“Back home.” Russell said, referencing some stark
contrast with the way things are here, in Bengaluru, and the way they are, uh,
back home. Blues Bobby and I nodded in agreement.
We are ex-pats, the three of us, voluntarily – for
a given value of voluntary – expatriated from lives of rigorous middle class
existences in the land that set the standard for rigorous middle class
existences, USA, the putative home.
Between us we have a cumulative 42 plus years’
worth of expatriation, which makes the word home problematic.
I have been in B’luru for getting on to fifteen
years.
Blues Bobby has spent the past twenty years in, …
you know, he doesn’t really talk about specifics much but I get the impression
that it was somewhere along the Adriatic coast. [He keeps looking over his
shoulder as he mutters and slurs his way through the non-specifics. I’ve
learned that it is best not to get too curious.] Blues Bobby is currently
domiciled in B'luru and is showing unmistakable symptoms, and, he has found a
blues band that, from time to time, invites him to sing lead. Anyway, in that span of time, neither of us
has been ‘back home’ for longer than the three weeks it took to deal with visa
issues; Blues Bobby twice, and I, once. Russell, in his decade here, returns
once a year with armloads of grandchildren gifts, all glitter and ethnic chic,
but, about 5 to 6 weeks into the mid-western summer he starts missing his lungi
and its commando option. Me? I’ve been here since the turn of the century. Though
India born, I was whisked off to the US in late childhood and my body and my
soul show the unmistakable signs of having come of age in the ‘60s, with all
the implications of that smoke wreathed transformative time.
Which begs the question, actually, begs a lot of
questions, but right up there on the list is, why? Why would 3 men in the, let’s
call it, early to mid-evening of their lives, choose to turn their inevitably
waning energies away from all that is familiar to establish, re-establish,
their edge-of-curmudgeonly routines into the mad energy that is Bangalore
today? And having done so, why would they still refer to the US as home when it
is patently not so?
The answer, I think, lies in the aforementioned ‘60s.
That was when the three of us began to think of home as the place where nothing
happened. The place where same old, same old was actively sought; the starting
point, the stultifying boredom of which started each of us on our peripatetic
journey into adulthood, the larger world, and its promise of a new tomorrow,
peace, love, rock ‘n’ roll, and creativity released from the bonds of
tradition.
Relased creativity pretty well describes Modern India (Mo’In)
(right?) in general and B’luru in particular. Strangers living next door to
strangers makes for really interesting cooking. India feels like the San
Francisco Sixties all up in here. There is a psychedelic tinge to the happenings of the street. Reality is being re-defined and anyone over thirty is being ignored, politely, but quite firmly. I can tell. Blues Bobby is getting more gigs.
Peace.
