Homecoming, Part I

It’s been well said, by one grand writer that one needs 'time and patience' and more than medicines to cure a sick person. Two utterly unexpected phone calls out-of-the-blue, towards the end of the week, last week, from my old friend miraculously cured me of the lingering after-effects of the nasty flu and hopelessness in a way medicines or even extended sleep or even attention to work could not do.

It’s been two years, two months and two days since my homecoming. After being in Wonderland and with my best friend for a whole day and a whole night, within a space of 24 hours, I was in the city where I’d spent 9 years of my youth. I am reminded of how I walked from Esplanade to Nandan and found a place to sit next to the unruffled pond of water. It started drizzling soon after and I was sitting in the shade of a tree and smoking. I think people who have stayed away from their country give out some odd vibe for there were random people, I remember, who asked me whether I was a tourist and where I was from. In my head I was thinking of the line ‘This world is not my home…’ and yet I didn’t want to leave the world right then for I knew I had promises to keep and so instead of being a smart-alec I’d said that I was not a tourist. I sat at Nandan and wondered and rather pensively about what was to be. I’ll take the risk of saying that I’m in a better place than I had been while sitting there in front of the pond and smoking.

I had left my country 11 years ago. When I’d left I hadn’t foreseen any reason that I would return for good. In fact I had absolutely no intentions of returning for good. And yet I knew of one happening that might have made me never leave. That did not happen. And so I did leave the country and on one very early morning. Like thousands and thousands of youths do worldwide as they travel to the US as eager and bright-eyed Master’s or Ph.D. students. I must say that this was one of the things that I had obsessed over when young and I can still remember the sense of relief with which I boarded that flight westwards. More than a lot of my concentration was directed towards one of the things I would do once I got to Purdue and yet that did not directly have anything to do with Graduate School or being in the US – or so I had assumed. It did and would have much to do with knowing, knowledge, and being in Graduate School too and beyond Graduate School but I didn't know about that back then. Back then, I'd seen it it as being inextricably linked with a couple of my childhood years, my long and awkward adolescent years and of curious and uncanny happenings which unfurled during my early youth. 

By the time I was in middle-school I’d gotten to know that people could go and study in the US for higher studies and could get full funding to study and a decent amount which covered living expenses and even savings. I’d actually secretly wanted to go to England for higher studies but back then and through my college years, I was told that people did not get funding from universities to study in England. So I’d decided that I would go to the US – and to study and to really know about all that perplexed me. If I’d told anybody in middle-school that I was going to engage in higher studies – I would have been laughed at. By the time I was in Class X, I’d managed to flunk every subject with the exception of History, Geography and Physics and maybe Biology but I can't be too sure of that last one. Maybe nobody flunked those subjects in school. Yet in spite of my bad performance in school, knowledge and knowing fascinated me. I hungered to know and know more of what really matters and to 'follow knowledge like a sinking star, beyond the utmost bounds of human thought...'. I was particularly fascinated by human beings, human minds and human behaviour and about what made human beings different from one another and sometimes not-so-different. I knew that sex, age, race, ethnicity, class, religion, national origin and none of those social markers separated the extraordinary human beings from the ordinary, trivial and evil ones. Yet quite what it was – I did not know. I was quite sure it was something peculiarly individual. Then there was – from the time I was in college – the haunting and persistent desire in wanting to unravel the ‘theory of everything’. One elegant theory which could explain the purpose and the reason of all life and bestow meaning upon this otherwise rather bizarre concatenation of features which marked life and existence on this planet. I was sure I could discover it and live like some messiah come to save the planet. Maybe I should be embarrassed to own up to this – but I’m not. I didn’t actually discover the theory of everything but I did discover my own meaning and purpose in life, which is not anything remotely trivial or ordinary. And I know I am walking on the path to fulfill that meaning well and truly…

But to go back to the curiosity otherwise I’ll be traveling on another path. I was sure that even reading alone would not help me in discovering or cracking the puzzle of life. Here, I was merely keeping in mind my own limitations – the fact that I couldn’t read a huge lot and digest all of it. But even so – I had heard and read and even seen documentaries on the fabulous libraries in the US and I’d heard how people could study what they wanted to in the universities and the whole deal sounded much like a good dream and I was determined that I would go to the US to know and learn and live like a human being who had chosen to be a knowledge hunter. I was interested in making money but I had had the feeling that if I could exploit my own skills which seemed to be in the area of understanding and explaining social and individual behaviour and engage in work that was interesting to me – I would neither be poor nor make a poor living. As for love and human relationships – since I had found out by my early twenties that I was unbelievably awkward in that racy, fine and sublime area and made more than most people uncomfortable by my presence after a bit of time, I had reluctantly decided that I’d have to leave that aside. I preferred keeping a stiff upper lip about matters of the spirit and God and letting them be, by then: my individual attempts, in early youth to pierce the veil and to understand the mind of God had driven me barmy. Fate of course most likely said a loud ‘ha!’ at my neat little decisions that I’d made upon the beginning of my travels towards higher knowledge like a scholar who had it ‘all figured out’ or so she thought.

My discipline was Sociology. I studied Sociology for my Bachelor’s by a process of elimination. I didn’t have Sociology for my high-school years. But just before applying to colleges in Calcutta in 1994, I was given some money to buy a few basic books. I got a feel for the discipline. What had fascinated me back then was that the discipline contained almost all the social sciences within its folds. As a social science discipline it had branches which related to psychology, politics, economics, anthropology, religion, literature and even biology. It was also, I could see, overwhelmingly concerned about the external social forces (family, schools, teachers, religion, media, class, gender and so on) that act upon an individual and how those structures ‘determine’ and shape the individual. And the topic of social determinism and human freedom kept me engaged in college. There was something in me however that strongly resisted the idea of social determinism. In this sense, I never quite became the conventional good sociologist in the twenty years that I was in formal academia but I certainly stuck to my guns. I argued vehemently that the individual was of importance and the exceptional individual was a case to be studied in and of himself and could not be seen as just another statistic. While most of my intelligent friends in college became ardent Marxists of various hues I became just as much of a militant too – about individualism – although I liked to think that I was not a militant. The matters of values, mental health, choice-making, creativity and intelligence, among other matters, interested me deeply. Now it feels a little strange to think that I managed to combine various aspects and do my Master’s and then my Ph.D. on topics which kept nudging me to think and held me completely in their thrall as a willing accomplice for a long, long time before I’d ever really known that I would engage in higher studies some 10,000 miles west.

Life in the US was more of a superb and somewhat disjointed dream for the first 9 months. I flew through the coursework without batting an eyelid and even managed to ace statistics – my bête noir. However, I had not known for a few months that we actually got grades in Graduate School. It was only when my old friend reminded me of ‘straight As’ that I went on to make enquiries and got worried that I hadn’t been paying attention to how much I was scoring on different exams and papers. I didn’t need to worry though on those grounds. I aced everything without a second thought those first two semesters. I read much. I typed a lot. I wrote not a bit in my diary. I was quite gregarious. I had made more than a few ‘friends’ and of different sorts from different parts of the world from our very mixed and rather mad dormitory housing. There was Irini, Clara, Eva, Miguel, Yanni, Domingo and Bean and others. Smoking brought together a bunch of people from the dorms – and there were plenty of conversations, debates, discussions, arguments over cigarettes and coffee and sometimes even some alcohol on the stairs of the dorm under the night sky if we didn’t meet at the coffee shop. The campus was very pretty – so I felt all along although many fellow students snorted at me. Friends said that Indiana University, Bloomington was pretty. Purdue was not pretty. I still went with my views on these matters. The lawns were a delight. The gym was huge and there was an Olympic-size swimming pool. What took my breath away was the absolute cleanliness and order and basic decency in public surroundings and the wonderful libraries. This is what makes the country, in spite of the dark and dirty and growing underbelly, still great – I think. For some reason, more than a few Indians didn’t care for the cleanliness. I had a vein in my head throbbing with anger when a couple of Indians said that the US obsession for cleanliness in public surroundings felt too sterile and antiseptic. More than a couple of Indians said the same thing and I had duly yelled my head off at them and most sarcastically. Apparently they all loved some smelly place in New York. It had felt like ‘home’. I never got a ticket for speedy driving but one day quite some years after the first 9 months, I had been staring at my 10^th floor corner dorm window with longing and with surreal memories knocking into me while crossing the road and a very smart cop crossed a road himself, approached me and scolded me for not walking carefully on the road. Right till the end I could never go to the school library without feeling that I was entering a cathedral. I remember some moments of holding books there and with different thoughts chasin my mind and of feeling like I was holding in my arms an incommensurable human life in that sacred silence. I used to go for long walks around town and especially to the river and to a hill. But it wasn’t all this and actually it was none of this that made those first 9 months a dream. That is another story that I've written about here and there and elsewhere…

The second year was a ghastly nightmare. I hope I don’t have to re-visit that time and space ever again although I’ve had the terrible fright more than once. I won’t talk about the why here but that second year was worse than horrible and there was not a thing that I could do about it even though God knows I tried. A couple of my department mates noticed the change in me and tried keeping me company for an evening or so during the week. They lived in apartments and I had had to shift rooms and was staying in a dark and gloomy dorm room that year. But somehow they came over to that dorm room and sometimes armed with alcohol and songs and we spent very long evenings in that room. I used to smoke in the dorm room. I did that in the first year too. I have the suspicion that the Resident Advisor knew about my misdemeanor but she and I used to get along well and so she overlooked my impudent breaking of the rule. I didn’t smoke at the beginning but then one day I set fire to a frozen waffle when I’d put it in the microwave for too long and by the time I got it out and doused it there was dense smoke in the room but the fire alarm didn’t go off. So I knew that a mere cigarette or two or more with the window open and with my head very near to it while sitting in an armchair couldn’t set off the fire-alarm. I got along very well with the cleaning maids who used to come around and one of them had very kindly lent me a thick blanket of her own accord and told me to put it up against the bottom of the door. She told me that it would prevent the smoke from escaping. I wasn’t so lucky in the second dorm. Every single thing was off that year. And when an anonymous complaint about ‘someone smoking’ went through I knocked on the door of the uptight Resident Advisor and told her that it was I who smoked and made sure that I moved out of the dorm as soon as my contract was over. The two friends who used to come over – Beth and Lorrell – sometimes pestered me to go out with them and on a few evenings I did. One evening, Lorrell after she got to know that I didn’t know how to drive insisted that she would teach me. We had gone bar hopping and afterwards we went to a deserted carpark and I drove for 15 minutes round and round and round the carpark while Beth had lain flat on the backseat worrying that a cop-car would spy us and that a cop would nab us. One late night Lorrell wanted to get a bottle of vodka and so the three of us went over to a pharmacy store (the pharmacy stores sell liquor too). The security guard took one look at us and felt that we were trouble. He insisted on following me around the store and I kept acting like I was going to do something amiss. Beth went red in the face and kept telling me to stop acting suspiciously. She was sure the guard was going to take out his gun and just blow my brains out or something. I told her not to be silly. I was just helping out the security guard. The poor man was following me around and if I didn’t act a little suspiciously – he would have felt miserable. It wasn’t really his fault though. The three of us – Black, White and Brown respectively – had walked in late at night in hoodies, jeans, sneakers and bloodshot eyes. We didn’t look very respectable as a group and didn’t look like law-abiding people.

The nice thing about renting a place there was that the apartments came with all the basic stuff and the Purdue University tag helped. Apartments had water, electricity and cooking gas connections in place. Most had central air-conditioning and every apartment had heating. Some apartments even had basic and nice clean furniture. And almost every place had a fridge, microwave, washing machine and dryer. So one’s own expenses were limited. I moved around apartments a fair bit in the first four years but stayed in the same place for the next six. Gosh yes – it was a decade. I had been absolutely sure that I would travel in the US. I had very badly wanted to go to Yosemite and The Redwood parks and the Grand Canyon before I had left for the US but I didn’t travel. It was too painful to visit terribly beautiful places without one friend. It didn’t make sense to me somehow. People will call me stupid and mad and obsessed and I won’t argue any more – but I can only accept that I had become a different person after the first year of Graduate School. I simply felt like a disembodied being for years even in little Lafayette and West Lafayette and while wandering around that pretty town and so I stayed put in Lafayette and traveled a whole lot in the mind. I had sometimes discombobulated and very interesting mind-trips even if I say so myself. Once I learnt driving I did make lots of driving trips to the airport to drop off friends or pick up friends. I think I may be the only Indian who stayed in the country for a decade and never once visited NYC. I did however change tyres on a car twice, went to court to file a case against a man who had threatened to slit my throat, went with a calm friend Beth to a piano concert in Chicago and I drove a u-haul truck through the Appalachians when a sane friend, Guha, moved to Maryland.

For some years in the middle I had utterly lost my compass and anchor. I swung this way and that and I helplessly watched sand run out of the hourglass. My old friend had once told me that all people should count but nobody should be allowed to matter and I had tried to put that in practice. I inadvertently put into practice the line from Kipling’s ‘If’ – ‘all men should count but none too much’. I paid a horrible price for it after those magical first 9 months. I should have known better but I had had the cocky belief that I didn’t need anyone in my life to live well but I had been mistaken about that. The pain that came with the realization that I had made the most horrible blunder in my life made me realize too of who and what really matter. I never did forget after that even if I became a trifle more weird. It also made me by-and-by eliminate all that was unnecessary from my life. I finished my Master’s a couple of years behind schedule but it was a nice little eccentric study once it was done. One of my professors kept hounding me in the corridors to publish my paper and others and I kept running away. For all aspiring academics I will say this: publish papers when you are graduate students if you are interested in staying and thriving in academe.

I started teaching courses from the third year and that was enormous fun. I remember though that on the first day of classes in a huge gallery, my legs were shaking like jelly as I faced some 90 students or more but my voice was very composed. I remember my favourite student from that first class. The Sociology 100 Introductory course was my favourite teaching class although students liked me in the Sociology Theory class. One semester, not a few of the students liked me even better than the professor. I rather liked the professor though. He and I got along fine even though he came across as being socially awkward to many people. I’d been teaching for three years when there was an urgent notice that came to the Department Chair which stated that I had not taken the mandatory English Test that was required of all foreign students who were teaching. The Department Chair and our Graduate Secretary were more annoyed with the notice than I was. Both of them grumbled saying that I had superlative language skills and yet there were those silly bureaucratic procedures that would have to be fulfilled. I took the test of course and it was fun actually. When the scores came in our Graduate Secretary had grunted and said that it wasn’t a surprise that I had scored full points for the exam. She had added that I could go and teach them a few English skills if need be.

I took quite a few extra courses through my Master’s and Ph.D. and when I was finally entering my Ph.D., a few years late, the paperwork I noticed stated that not all the courses I had taken would count towards my PhD. That was a bother and so I took some more courses that I simply wanted to take and not because they were related to my Ph.D. One course was on ‘Nation and Nationalism’ but about that some other time maybe. I worked on a completely different topic for my Ph.D. for quite some years in the middle. But then the sun shone in utterly out-of-the-blue on one fine day in 2007. After a very awkward year and three more years of wandering around the other topic on environmental values and scientists, I finally zoned in on my choicest Ph.D. topic. I had a very clear sleep dream which made me change my topic. Many people in the department thought that I had finally lost it and that I was mad. But the old professors trusted me. One old prof with whom I’d never taken a class told me one day that it didn’t matter if I took awhile; what mattered was the quality of my Ph.D. My Ph.D. advisor and committee members were fine with the topic change. The last one and a half years were marvelous in a different way from the first nine months. A few times I would feel melancholic during the last lap of my Graduate Studies that I’d lost so much of time. I couldn’t help thinking that had I done the maverick study within the first few years I’d be one of those ‘cool’ academic stars and could have made good in a way that could have made a genuine difference. Still. I made good in one way, I think and when I read this I feel more than vindicated. It’s one thing not to do a Ph.D. but I can’t possibly imagine having done my Ph.D. on anybody or anything other than whom and what I ultimately did it on. I remember while there were professors who literally had shining eyes when I graduated (and not just my advisor), our then graduate secretary sent me a lovely e-mail saying that she had gone for my graduation ceremony and she was very pleased to see that I didn’t race across the stage in my usual style. She was very worried that I would run across the stage and she said that I had been very ‘graceful’. Me, graceful – can you imagine. I also know that not a few professors started wishing that some student of theirs would do a Ph.D. on them! Once I finished my Ph.D. I felt with that strange feeling inside which isn’t always right that I needed to and desperately wanted to come back home. I knew, like E.T. exactly what home meant for me: home is where the heart and soul is. I was terribly homesick. It wasn’t just a childish sentiment. I knew too and in a very hard-reasoned way that I simply didn’t want to stick around in formal academe in the U.S. any longer. I was done with the whole thing. I can very well empathize with Max Weber’s saying that he studied Sociology to see how much of the world he could take. For me it was the idea of the anti-climax. Nothing I could do or achieve within formal academe would ever compare to what I did for my Ph.D. But I wasn’t ‘allowed’ to come back right away and so I stuck on and with various odd pieces of work and a very odd existence – academic and otherwise. Call it fate or God!

And then, just as I was giving up all hope I was allowed, indeed told to come back home, back in 2013. I was beyond relieved and delighted. A different story began then. For a few weeks recently, I was wondering whether I’ll be able to truly make good. It haunts me, this. I can't see the reason though for being around unless I can so I can't imagine that I won't be able to make good. I want to and need to make good for this life and for whatever that follows. That's all for now.