(Pseu)Desi girls

IBCP

Indian Born Confused Pseu-desi.

You cannot tell me I am the only one. 

We are the lot who lived a protected life as kids, mostly in our own imaginary world, and then migrated to another country in our formative years. Only to never find a way back home. Because the country of origin has rapidly transformed into a winter vacation destination where we spend our time in perpetual special 'welcome home' status.

As such we relate to no one. 

We meet Desis (Indians abroad who believe they have a strong sense of Indian-ness) in our country of residence, happily celebrating Indian festivals, organising (to me rather painful) get togethers, and we feel nothing but the desire to disappear from the scene because it's not something we did back home, so overdoing it now feels unnatural.

We meet locals in our country of residence, and as much as we would like to fit in, the first mention of some obscure childhood television show (which didn't make its way to Indian TV) instantly creates this barrier to belonging. We nod our heads pretending to get it, but we clearly don't and never will.

And then we meet these second generation Indians, lovingly called as (Insert first letter of country of residence)BCDs, but this is where we realize that there are indeed 50 shades of confusion and no two confused states shall ever relate to one another. Apart from our daily struggles and confusion, our accents are completely different too - making sure that we can only mix as well as oil and water.

And so in order to build a community of (un)like-minded global misfits and outliers who are not only displaced from their home countries but are also equally unsettled in their residing countries, I feel the need to give us a catchy name and definition. 

At least now there is a chance that Google will randomly recommend a Meet up for fellow psudesis or IBCPs (or whatever acronym catches on - I don't claim to be an influencer) when I am least expecting it.

Dusty Days

 Somedays, some very occasional dusty days, I feel I need to give in to it. Just succumb to it completely.

Most days though, I am fighting it. I wear a mask, I wash my hands a million times, my allergies remind me to stay away. I am fearful, lazy and an escapist. At best.

I feel constrained in a world that my mind has created and trained to believe that it is beautiful. I don't fit my own idea of beauty and I know I need to update my thinking. And yet the escapist in me happily wastes time building a maze within my mind, to reach the place I know I should be operating from.

From childhood, I have a habit and almost an innate need to preserve my core. There was a time I was definitely ashamed of it, though over the years I may have normalised it in my head, and perhaps added layers to it in a way that part justifies, part rationalises my identity to that hidden core. But there is still some disconnect there, which unless I make my way into the self created maze, I will never manage to connect.

Some days though, I pretend to be so normal, I could fool myself.

To the point where I float just above that layer of vacuum that I have created, below which I know is all dusty.

Oxygen therapy

 Squeezing my eyes shut, and mouth as open as I can, willing my ears to filter out the horrifying sound of some deadly metal rod scraping away at my teeth and gums - this is when I realise that I need to breathe. 

I always knew, that I have a low tolerance for pain and not the greatest of faith in medical ability of humans and yet, when faced with the unavoidable situation that I was in, the only relief I found was to focus on my breathing.

It is such a given, as living beings, of course we breathe to live, but I had not acknowledged the power this simple act has - the way it can send to background, the painful feeling that you want to avoid. Almost like balancing those nerves and sending a strong signal to the brain, that I am still alive and things are not so bad. We can make it back from here. We can pick ourselves up. 

And come to think of it, I use it at other times too. Like when I am running, and my body tells me after the first 10 minutes, that I cannot go any further, that I have to stop. That is when I start focusing on every breath. I take deeper breaths and breathe out from my mouth. I don't know if others do this - but I do, to keep going. And slowly my body falls into this silent commanding rhythm, and I feel relaxed as I keep running.

So in a way, this is my long winded attempt at reminding myself - that even when the situation seems rather overwhelming and the problem at hand maybe overly complex, sometimes the solution may still be quite simple. It is ok to take a moment to pause, breathe, create a bit of a mental distance between the problem and yourself, and then decide next course of action.

A ghost and a shadow

If I think about it,

You have always been

Like a ghost to me.

On most days

A forgotten memory,

Until suddenly your absence

Sends a chill down my spine.

And like a soul, possessed,

I find myself sitting out in my balcony

Having an imaginary conversation 

About gangsters and their paradise.

And I have been

Like a shadow to you.

Following a notion of you around,

trying to keep up,

Riding the crest, and then down the valley

Until eventually I disappear,

Sinking back into the horizon.

And that is how we exist - 

A ghost and a shadow,

A long distance relationship, 

Thriving in imperfect harmony.

We don't belong in the same song,

Our heart beats don't even rhyme

And the smiles we shared, 

in our overlapped past - 

While some were fake,

Others, a function of incidental

happenstance.

Yet somehow after all these years

You found me, slowly blending

Into my backdrop.

And revealed again that child in me,

Who wrote verses and jumped a lot.

---

To that one friend, who I don't really understand and I don't know if he understands me either. But when we meet, we smile at each other.