Hopefully, I’ll get to meet my family soon and I’m longing to bridge, momentarily, the enormous distance imposed between all of us
In Tramin’s bucolic setting, I’ve learnt to keep my feet on the ground. Pic/Rosalyn D’mello
I like to call myself a non-native informant, and I like to think of my columns as dispatches about my findings and conclusions. I enjoy playing the role of the outsider looking through and into and making speculations and being proven wrong, or humorously approaching the rituals that serve as local traditions. Not once since I moved have I regretted moving away from the urban. Not once have I lamented my decision to dwell within the rural and remote. I’m still processing why that is. For instance, I was sure I didn’t want to move to Berlin or Vienna, cities in which I could potentially have been able to earn a livelihood, given my background in arts criticism. I remember being apprehensive about falling into the same trappings into which I had become immersed during my decade in Delhi. I was done ‘networking’, talking to professional strangers in a manner that discreetly boasted my accomplishments so as to be taken seriously. Maybe I craved the anonymity that comes from being known through a relation. Here in Tramin I am identified as my father-in-law’s daughter. Because he is such a kind, generous, and loving person, I take a certain pleasure in this identity… But I admit I also enjoy being introduced to people by either him or other members of his family. I like the pride they take in my personhood. I suppose I like that my relationships within Tramin expand through familial networks. It’s different, and exciting, but it also, often, allows me to access my childhood and adolescence; the unique experience of growing up in a little enclave of five buildings and one bungalow, but within the larger diverse universe of Kurla, where I have had different identities, as my brother’s sister, Rosalyn, Millennium Queen, and, eventually, my mother’s daughter. My life in Delhi was premised on discovering my selfhood in the absence of the familial, which offered me distance from my loved ones, but also allowed for a more generous appreciation of all the specific details that made my family and our context so unique.
In a few weeks, hopefully, my partner and I will board a flight from Milan to Dubai so we can finally meet my entire family, except for my sister and my brother-in-law and spend a week with them. I sometimes fantasise about what it will feel like in my body to hug my mother again, to touch her soft skin; to embrace my father as he tries to lift me up, to compare my niblings’ height against my own to gauge how much they’ve grown. None of us are the same people we were when we last saw each other. We have all been transformed by the circumstances that shook our collective worlds. How I have missed the frenzy and chaos of our togetherness, my parents’ cooking, the easy laughter and inside jokes. I am longing for the relief of bridging, momentarily, the enormous distance imposed between all of us, this enormous duration of physical absence.
Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D’Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper
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