Every few years when Kerala heads into elections, few things dominate the public discourse as politics and all the accompanying debates, gossip, insinuations and allegations. Based on the fury and sound of it all, signifying something, one might even be lulled to believe that it is politics that grants meaning to everyday life. But the story of Kerala’s residents is often the story of movements and migrations through various sociopolitical systems outside the state, in an effort to earn livelihoods that promise a rickety ascent into the middle class and fulfillment of accompanying vanities. The consequence of this outmigration is that the politics at ‘home’ acquires even more relevance—it often acts as an anchor to their lives as what the author Deepak Unnikrishnan calls ‘temporary people’. These are people we see in many countries who aren’t citizens or legalized residents but aren’t illegal either. Their status is linked to their employment and therefore they spend much of their lives in a form of vassalage to their employers. These persons keep many of these societies afloat without any direct legal right to its future. Their inner non-belonging births paroxysms, nostalgia and steady construction of imagined ideas of home—all of which are inadequately understood and often traduced by those who live more assured lives. This, of course, is not unique to Kerala but is a human condition that we see across migrant communities but few societies have constructed an entire sociocultural system where a great many residents rely on the idea of leaving home to flourish.
Thinking about it all, I was reminded of my own travels from Kozhikode to Dubai—wherefrom I catch my flight to New York—during which I have often met many such ‘temporary’ persons. The flight from Kozhikode or Kochi to Dubai is typically three and half hour long. The whole change of pace born from leaving the intrusive warmths of Indian families and heading back to the austere impersonal life in America often produces a sense of disquiet, a feeling of something being amiss. The result is a form of sleeplessness despite eyes wide shut. My mind wanders on matters puerile and portentous: did I forget my keys to the apartment, are my trousers ironed for work the next day, did I leave the milk carton outside before I left? I flit between reason and speculation, between thoughts about home and the anxiety of arrival.
As I grow older, my love for take offs has slowly ceded grounds to the pleasures of solitude at 35,000 feet, especially if I manage to finagle a window seat. The oceanic blue outside fills me with a calm that I can no longer describe. That vast emptiness outside and I are separated simply by three layers of acrylic plastic window. Clouds concatenations that seem, from the grounds, like behemoth armies on the move are nowhere up at that height. Those oversized wisp-o-willows that bring us rain are tucked away at 10,000 feet below any modern airline. Up there, a patient (or bored) traveler can see the skies’ diaphanous fabric change colors as the sun travels its course and this airplane slips through time zones, like a caterpillar making its way through a leaf.
Millenia of human fascination and reverence towards clouds are now upended thanks to air travel. Nevertheless, I have always been amazed that Kalidasa in the 5th century knew that clouds consisted “of vapor, light, water and wind”, dhūma jyotiḥ salila marutāṃ. That, despite his physicalist understanding, he chose to use clouds as a narrative device speaks to his deep recognition that separated from home, even inanimate object make for good companions. I recognize that sense of attenuation, that low hum of angst which, like some cosmic radiation fills up my inner universe, every time I leave home, all too well. Kalidasa’s protagonist, the unnamed Yaksha, separated from his wife and the splendors of his home in Alakapuri, is surprisingly human. Perhaps, he is all too Indian. Prolixity is his virtue and the quest for rootedness his creed.
These days we would probably say that the Yaksha suffered from a bout of nostalgia —as if it were a case of common cold or syphilis, treatable by a round of antibiotics. It is a word we employ casually around these days. Television anchors in Kerala tell us, in their patois of Malayalam and English, that they are “nostalgic” for the films of yesteryears; cultural critics talk of the simpler times of the past; one-day cricketers talk of times before 20/20. In face of change and uncertainty, it is understandable that these all too human longings emerge and proliferate in unexpected ways. But, to mistake longing for nostalgia, mistakes sentiment for accuracy. In Greek, nostalgia comes from nostos (return) + algos (suffering): the suffering caused by an impossibility of return. The key here is suffering, the visceral and seemingly eternal pain from a recognition that a return home is unlikely. This ‘home’ isn’t strictly a place, but a concatenation of time and contingencies that is unlikely to return. The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera writes that in Iceland, one of the oldest European cultures, they distinguish between söknuour (nostalgia as the suffering) and heimprá (longing for home).
Unlike most Indian languages, Malayalam has a surprisingly precise word for that complex of sentiments that we would describe as nostalgia — ‘Grihaduratvam’. I couldn’t think of an equivalent term in Hindi, Gujarati or say Tamil. Then, I asked on Twitter and got a number of responses. In Malayalam, this form of longing (loosely, nostalgia) is usually subsumed under the term 'grihaaduratvam'. what is "nostalgia" in other Indian languages?
Kannada has something similar—grihaviraha—but here, the emphasis is on a form of melancholy born out of separation (in the typology of heroines in Indian dramaturgy — one of them is a virahotkanthitha nayika: an heroine worn down by separation from her beloved). I have often wondered why does Malayalam have this term? Why has it become so popular? The word is deployed so often that it is almost cliched? Perhaps, I have reasoned over the years, it reveals the Malayali’s conscious quest to find his place in this world that he may call home. The word’s popularity is simply due to the labor emigration into the Gulf which has demanded that the language reflect the reality of perpetual longing.
The plane from Kozhikode to Dubai is usually rife with both: suffering and longing. And on that flight in 2009, it was no different. The smell of perfume and sweat commingled. Neatly coiffed young mustachioed Malayalis fiddled with their seatbelts, checked in-flight Malayalam movies and awaited the air hostess, patiently, like penitents at the altar, to bring them another little free plastic bottle of whisky or wine. It was an all too familiar scene that I have watched closely. By now, most people in Kerala are inured to the charms and horrors of going to the Gulf. These men, and increasingly women too, head into the desert monarchies to work, to live in societies with carefully constructed social hierarchies. All the while, they create enclaves of familiarity. It is a make-belief world with Onam celebrations, Malayalam classes for their children, new cars, illicit love affairs, spousal abuses, expatriate poets, newspapers, cable TV, chit fund scams, political affiliations and visa problems. Like all immigrant efforts to construct a familiar world—be it the Chinese in Singapore, the Gujaratis in East Africa, the Tamils in California, the Sikhs in Vancouver, the Turks in Germany, the Puerto Ricans in New York—theirs is an effort that is one part mimicry of the world they have left behind and another a last ditch efforts to remain rooted, before their children fly away to North America or Europe. Amidst Arabian sands and spires of concrete and glass, they carefully tend to their memory of a green and moist land they left behind.
On that flight, the man who sat in the next seat watched me carefully as I kept replying to emails on my Blackberry. I smiled at him, and he responded with a grateful grin. Later, when we got talking, he told me that he was hesitant to say hello, because he had seen me read a book in English, and had therefore inferred that I probably didn’t speak Malayalam. He was happily surprised to learn otherwise. He told me—all too eagerly, I noticed then—he worked at the Lulu Hypermarket in Abu Dhabi, where he was an odd-jobs man. He was responsible for stocking up the racks with soaps, sanitary pads, lipsticks and shoes, cleaning up the floors in case something is spilt. His most important responsibility was to bring cash from the manager’s offices to the check-out counter when the cashiers call for it. In his early forties, all this was no doubt hard work. The psychic trauma—to be at the beck and call of everybody—would have accreted by now.
Visiting Kerala was his one reprieve. I was curious to know about the big questions: how was life in Abu Dhabi, how was the justice system there, did the Arabs treat Indians as equals? All these were silly questions and a stupid way to try to understand another human being. I treated him as an end to confirm or deny my own worldview, as an informer into the mores of a world that I could only be superficially curious about. In some sense I wasn’t interested in him as a human being, but only as a means to validate my own perceptions. No matter what he would have said, I wouldn’t have heard him. I was yet to learn how to listen to another.
I remember he was, however, quite interested to tell me about his home in a village called Tirurangadi in Malapurram. It is a place I have often driven by. In my mind, I associated it with the faint whiff of an early morning haul of fish, the azaan from the mosque, the torn and bleached out posters of Malayalam film industry’s overweight heroes, the school children who stream dutifully in lines and young women who wait patiently for the bus on the roads. In short, it was a village no different than a thousand other overgrown hamlets in Malabar. But, from him, I learned this non-descript village was also a place of family, of expectations, of marriages, of disappointments, of expenses, of lack of employment and and mounting frustrations.
Dubai may glitter ahead and Abu Dhabi may tantalize, but to him, few places were more interesting than that unremarkable village in Malapurram. Years later, I realized his could have been a life-history of a person, spanning from the Maghreb to Indonesia—a weary tale of human movements away from home in search of economic security. That plane from Kozhikode was filled with those who head to toil away in obscure shopping complexes and small establishments in the Arabian sands, even as they long for their homes. But they too must put in their time in a distant land. When the flight lands, one can see in their fidgetiness and scramble to leave the plane an eagerness to be done away with this journey, to start their other life in these desert metropolises as fast as they can, so that they may return home once again. Only however to leave yet again. In a way, they are the children of Kalidasa’s Yaksha, albeit in the age of globalization, who must relive their separation an infinite number of times, till one day they become too old and must return to a home that is now barely recognizable. Their homes, they’ll discover, have become foreign to them. []
[A version of this essay appeared in OPEN, 26 Mar, 2021]