Home: A Scrappy Manifesto, or A Manifestation of Scraps?

February 12, 2009
New Delhi

When she said I couldn’t go, the tears jumped up and knocked smartly on the back of my throat, and that made the realization easier. One of those little revelations, the ones that are lived over and over again.

So I left, and leaving, as it often does, allowed me to decide, on an upbeat swing note for the music passing between my ears, that the place I was leaving had succeeded in becoming another home. That I was leaving something worthy of being left with some measure of respect, with an ironic smile for the memories and expectations, with a bustle of importance, maybe with a little ritual. There’s always a little ritual, with home.

There was a mustard yellow tent on a rickety set of plywood risers for stacking crates, smoothed over with collapsed cardboard boxes and glowing in a populated parking lot next to a school and a church and a hundred thousand houses with calendars opened to August and doors with bright orange x’s marking the bodies found inside. There was another tent, an earlier one that I sometimes forget, but it was surrounded by the most brilliant green and inhabited by a first breath.

There was a bunk – a number of bunks – but there was a closet as well, and a cot on a porch with the indelible inedible orchard trees framing Orion and illicit hand-holding pairs of fleeces and patchily inbred deer passing in the streetlights leading towards the communal washrooms down the path, and in the moonlight leading toward the private beach at the bottom of the hill.

There was a flag – plain blue, with the globe spinning softly in the center in dull greens and grays and wrapped in white ribbons – that hung above each one, over a desk or a bed or a bricked-in fire place, and a collection of oddities – a home-made incense holder and a decorative bird’s nest and stuffed microbes and a heart-shaped puzzle box holding a cheap white plastic bead necklace – that sat in front of each collection of books on each consecutive set of shelves. Next to the flag was Moby, and once, next to Moby was Ani.

There was a cave, and a lookout, and there were castles for princesses and studios for artists. One the other side, there was a cabin.

There was a tree, but I can’t tell you where, or why.

There was a cot in a common room, but it only became mine when the other lights were out and I could see the dining table in the moonlight through the mosquito netting and the borrowed refrigerator hummed companionably at me.

This morning, there was thick light slicing the polluted air into heavenly strips hanging from lush, stunted trees. There was music blasting wordlessly from my lips as I passed elderly couples in salwars and dotis meandering past the peacocks, young couples in multi-pocketed jeans and sparkle shirts cuddling on benches, a man doing push-ups between two rocks, a woman in green seated on a wide balustrade and saluting the sky. The sounds rolled down my legs, picked up my feet, and marionetted me to the tent and the roof and the cabin, to the flag and the sarong repeatedly laid out on blue pleather benches rumbling softly past the lives of a million unknown faces.

There are vehicles that become home, and people, and rooms rented for a night. There are communal kitchens, and these always have dish-washing tension. There are bits, scattered and scrappy but planted securely and distributed in the seven seas and in the one tiny stream that connects the eighth.

~

Scraps: On the other side of the tents was a laboratory with a white couch for tossing winter coats. There was a studio by a lake, and on a roof, and there was pattering in an old school, but somehow it’s the changing room, the bit of transformation from street clothes, past a naked body, and off to lycra-blended cotton and a place dedicated to the glory of movement that always felt the most real. There was a Ville and a World and a Land and a Pad, and there will be many more.

Personalities, Borders, and Other Recent Inventions

December 25th, 2008 – January 1st, 2009
Bangkok, Thailand and Siem Reap, Cambodia

The pedals were whirling smoothly of their own accord on the slight downhill, the chipped pink paint of my rented bicycle purpling in the fading light, when I realized that there was no more resistance. The gear – conveniently covered to protect itself from the half-paved tourist-worn red dirt roads – had slipped. We started walking, Benj and I, each balancing a bike and peering forward for rides and behind for imagined bandits. As we reached the giant beheaded gate, the moon was just coming out to tease us – silly wandering children, she chided, and dipped behind the tiered crown of a beaming stone face. The first man who stopped, worried for our safety or our delicate foreign legs and shaky psyches, spoke spotty French, but five minutes of monsieur and mademoiselle couldn’t make up for our nonexistent Khmer. He gestured towards his own bike, but the sizzle of a day’s worth of sweat instantly evaporating from my calf made me jump back and in the end we were walking again, balancing bikes and glancing in zig zags across the road to the sounds of small apologetic gasps emanating from young Cambodian families piled on motorbikes and overweight Germans cuddled in rumbling tuk-tuks.

When the mini tractor, nothing more than a green wooden wagon attached to a motor piled with one young man, three little boys, and a stack of five white pig buckets passed us, I said a cartoon ‘shucks’ in my head and went back to tracing the now completely darkened road, the half-grin of a momentarily hopeless situation settling quick across my face. When the mini tractor backtracked to offer us a ride, we passed over five bucks, stacked the bikes on the buckets, the boys on the bikes, and ourselves on the slightly widened wood where the handle of the wagon connected to the engine, and rattled backwards in to town. The boys grinned as we passed darkened fields and roadside water stands and told us they had tried to sell us bracelets earlier that day – we asked them pointless questions about the ruins, and the moon congratulated us on our friendly ride.

~

She was standing ahead of me and to the left when I decided she was American, and was about to leave the room when I saw the eagle with its crossed arrows on her passport. We were in between countries, passing the disgusting grey edifices of casinos splashed with neon signs above dirty naked children and trafficked goods passing between Cambodia and Thailand when I ran up behind her and with a hello, asked to join her caravan. Ash was traveling with her father and his friend, and as we filed in to the snaking lines of the entry stamp office we were exchanging basic details, and as we filed out we were discussing travel exhaustion and the moment when you don’t want to meet one more new person, when you are closed and barricaded and turn around and start the most amazing conversation with a complete stranger.

A shining minivan carried us, along with three bright blonde children, their parents busy shielding their eyes from an en-route DVD showing of Blood Diamond, to our first seven-eleven. In between stops, and long before the sky painted streaks over Thai farmers and the skyscrapers crept up on us and Bangkok swallowed us whole, her father leaned back around the sanitized pleather headrest to say ‘they’re just like long-lost cousins,’ and to smile forward at his friend and ask why they don’t chatter like that anymore. There’s a point in a friendship when most of your stories have already been told, I thought, but Ash and I had newness to exchange, and for the moment, that’s what kept the words bouncing off air-conditioned windows for hours at a stretch. She was teaching, and living, and we talked about building patterns and making friends and uncomfortable comforts and the calm femininity of Thailand and the masculine-presenting mother-worshipping melee of India; we talked about comparative cross-cultural relationships (with the vague conclusion that the hardest part is context for expectations), about singular beginnings and being happy with your own life as you have chosen to live it.

~

The fist day, when I stepped out of a cab with the English bloke (we met in the taxi line at the airport) and on to the sky train I couldn’t help grinning at its smooth efficiency. I picked up packaged sushi and leaned my travel-gritted backpack against the shining plastic seats. The first few nights were a blur of detangling – but the day the bicycle broke down, I woke up. I savored the dark plywood walls and plastic plum blanket and oversized bamboo cutting growing out of an Angkor Beer bottle in my cheap guest-house room, the thick names of the three glowing Isreali girls who taught me a new old card game at a rest stop with a perfect breeze and easy-going dollops of sunshine, the left to far-left political conversation I shared with a Norwegian bus-mate. I savored the stone, of course, although it seemed small and perhaps precious compared to the soaring walls of the Red Forts and the miles of carvings on mosques and temples that have come near to saturating my eyes’ ability to pick out details over the last sixteen months. The ancient Khmer stones were overpopulated with Japanese cameras, but when the bikes carried us to the quieter spots we drew up images of old-time monasteries, of aromatic woven grass carpets for Kings… of why the sea is boiling hot, and whether pigs have wings.*

~

By the last day, the question of borders had been solved (they are mostly arbitrary and often bloodstained, but with the privilege of an American passport many of them quickly dissolve), but the question of personalities had become imminent. I used couch surfing** to coordinate both my stays in Bangkok, cutting down on cost and adding up characters along the way. When 2009 hit, I was standing in the middle of the Thai equivalent of Times Square, and a few hours later a Belgian helped me to contact my Cameroonian host so that my Canadian co-surfer and I could reach an obscure suburb of the city where I slept for an hour and a half before taking a hot-pink taxi just around the corner to the obsequiously ostentatious Bangkok International Airport. “This is globalization,” the Belgian said with an eager smile, “Europeans helping North Americans to find Africans in Asia.”

This is my inconclusion on the recent invention of personality. Over the last few years, it has become increasingly clear to me how easy it is to guide a stranger’s first impression of your fundamental character. Pick a story to start with – the houseboat one leaves them interested but with little knowledge about what I do or care about, the travel ones give them insight into adventure and homeliness, my opinion of India leaves me looking eager and worn at the same time, (only a true masochist chooses to start with a negative portrait). This part is easy – and dangerous – because most people don’t get past the stories. If you’re always on the road, you’re always meeting, interacting, and if you’re charismatic, that’s great – people are impressed by openness. But if you’re always interacting with a new face you don’t have to dig far, you don’t have to face the parts of your personality you’re not proud of, and you don’t have to deal with the fallout of complex relationships over time.

I’ve met a number of travelers – some Couch Surfing hosts and surfers, some travelers circling the globe with no desire to settle, some off for a few months and happily ignoring what they left and where they’re going, others with less of a plan and more of a series of vague instincts to turn left or go up that hill – who use travel to escape not just their contexts and original communities, but to escape the responsibility of a simple piece of the social contract,*** of caring for others over time, and for letting others take care of them, and to escape the vulnerability that engaging in that contract implies.

As I realized this, I remembered why I moved to Kolkata – to join a queer community in work and activism, and to build a community of friends in a place where I had reasonable grounds to believe I would find people who shared my interest in abstract ideas and concrete delicacies. I wanted to be known, not broadly but deeply, to make a home and invite people into it. I stayed in India for Round 2 for a number of reasons – one of those reasons was to build on the experience of the first year and the comfort I had gained in this colorful blast of a context so that I wasn’t just managing to make it here, but was actively creating it (whatever it is, experience or daily jostle or a simple revelation or two).

When I stepped off the plane from Thailand, shaking the last strains of ‘Camp Rock’ out of my airplane-addled head, I didn’t want to face the famed daily discomforts of India. But the strangest thing happened – the discomforts were comfortable, familiar. They made me smile, despite and after and before the furrowed brow bit and the part where I ignore the four-year-old beggars on my street and the half-dead dogs napping in the sun and growl at the driver who tries to cheat me and the bus that comes inches from running me over as I cross the road. Walking down my street, I felt totally separate and completely integrated – the common stranger, the local that girl, the one who, in all her strangeness, belongs here in this corner of a post-colonial communist moss-covered city.

~

* With all due respect to Lewis Carroll, and to the Happy Medium poster that hung in my bedroom on the houseboat.
** Couch surfing is an idea – but it is also a social networking travel website (www.couchsurfing.org) designed to coordinate free places for travelers to stay. The idea is simple – you put up a profile with a small description of yourself and a brief statement about whether you can offer a couch for a traveler to stay on for free. When you want to travel, you can search the database of profiles for people offering free accommodation at your destination, and send messages asking other couch surfing members whether you can stay with them. After the rendezvous, you can add members as ‘friends’ and leave ‘references’ on their profile, recommending them to other travelers (or not). Of course, simple builds on itself, and there are groups and official meet-ups, chat rooms and, I’m sure, many applications I haven’t even discovered yet. It has some significant pitfalls, surrounding the fact that most people on this planet seem to be both fundamentally caring and fundamentally strange, but it’s an invaluable resource when used well.
*** While (more often than not, in my experience) fulfilling another important piece of the social contract, to welcome and care for the stranger.