Chasing the C-word
A personal note on why I left the 'citadel' for a seat at the edge of the world
Before the faint tinges of discomfort would settle in, before the first words of reassurance (“Everything is going to be okay”) would ring true, most people, with a point to prove, are often seen packing their bags, if not already reaching for the door.
Not walking away. Only leaving.
The road offers to those who seek it… an adventure, in all its dreamy poise.
It always has.
For one of conservative habits, it offers the freeing of the self from labour and, through it, a sense of control. Often, better prospects of finding a partner of comparable modern tastes.
For the inspired, the dilemma of choice and vestiges of power. Only to later then bask in solitude.
While the journey makes a man of the boy. It is the destination that gets to decide if he will wear a suit. I took to the road shortly after I realised that where I was, was the edge of the world.
Lugging a suitcase twice my weight and pretending to be more threatening than the few Marathi cohorts that shared my train compartment, I travelled north.
The journey was anything but unordinary. Soon, I had a job I loved, a sense of control, some vestiges of power, occasional skirmishes with rickshaw-wallas, and most importantly, a sense of belonging that I found myself strangely unaccustomed to.
It could have been enough. Hell, it should have been. Everything was going to be okay.
But just okay was to mean that I could no longer love it.
To love it still came at the expense of feeling less.
The road now forked away from under and emerged into clear light. And for reasons I’m only now beginning to understand, I was back on the road again.
Considering my then position and what had been designed for me, some would call me ungrateful and others, delusional for having left. I thought myself to be both and profoundly spoiled for wanting more.
I knew I was not entitled to much or anything at all…
but I did feel like I deserved to be in a state of perennial empowerment.
The tumult of emotions in me had neither the audience it dreamed for nor the critic it dreaded. It lived on and I dwelled in it - swaying bellicosely between a desire to stay and a lusting to leave.
I searched frantically for things to fill my hours in the hope that being busy would in time equal being happy. To that extent, I volunteered for obscure causes, took courses online, improved my math and logic skills, built a card game, participated in coffee-brewing lessons and wine-appreciation classes, worked on a film project, started coding digital platforms, reviewed punk-rock music, and walked eight kilometres every day for an entire year.
I was ferocious. Driven by an insatiable thirst that hinged madness. Howling for progress. For change.
Then, there were other days, where, if I made it out of the bed and to work and back, I would call it a victory. They left me in despair and with each passing day, became too much to bear.
The road, the journey, the destination - none of it offered what I really wanted and I was unsure if I was allowed to have what it was that I wanted.
I was chasing the ever-elusive C-word.
Contentment.
There is no need for grief. Nobody needs to know. There is no air of crisis.
If anything, only furtive glances at strangers - future partners of comparable modern tastes; futile attempts at claiming some more vestiges of power; inward sighs and long walks to nowhere.
The crisis, though, is very real. You will find hints of it in the trenches of modern civility; in suicide statistics and drug abuse cases; in social obsolescence; and in the not-giving-a-f*cks.
My road forked home. I returned for the same reasons I left it: I have found some things to be true here and nowhere else.
I sit now at the edge of the world, sipping weak tea under a leaden sky, contemplating surging waves and retreating certainties. I’m far from content. And that’s only human. We could be far worse.