I have always been fascinated by the human mind’s ability to adapt. One moment I am a university graduate, feeling the weight of an unjust world at an unprecedented depth, desperately grasping for ways to mobilize what has become a fragile, debilitating empathy. I lingered there. Maybe in an attempt to reclaim a stolen farewell, certainly in a successful attempt to simply sit and breathe after feeling like my chest encased in metal.
Next, I am in Lucknow, learning my mother tongue from a grammar book and processing every cliché diasporic trauma as I navigate the intersections of my Indian identity, my Muslim identity, my caste identity, my gender identity, without my family’s fallible compass to guide me.
I am always in my head, fear is too central, I run to New Orleans in a desperate attempt to be the type of person I have always wanted to be. People do not change so quickly, though. Or maybe I changed, but not in the way I had hoped. I go to Houston. My aunt cries because she realizes she won’t see me over the winter holiday. I hold hands with my soul sister as I affirm that stability is overrated and youth is fleeting. But what a privilege it is to have in the first place.
I return to Washington DC, where I encounter souls so vibrant they reflect against me, they reflect in me, the setting of my disillusionment, the place I learned what community means and why they try so hard to dismantle it, the headliner of my goodbye tour. And then once again I am back in my childhood home, a place I turned into a burnout refuge in brief summer and winter visits, experiencing the euphoria and dysphoria of nostalgia, accepting that in my absence people will grow and age and for that fact I feel a pinching sort of guilt.
Suddenly, I’m in Delhi, fueled by the highs of optimism and instant camaraderie, finally ready to mobilize this empathy I spent the past four years conceptualizing, feeling I have arrived on the other side of a mountain whose slope was so slight I had not even realized I was climbing, I had not even realized the air was so thin.
And now I am in Hyderabad, thrust into the reality of working a full-time job, five weeks in, and only now feeling like I have a sense of my project. No routine, still in survival mode. This is life now, I have adjusted enough. I have a place to sleep, a favorite spot for chai and another for coffee. I memorized my route to work. I’m exhausted. I’m frustrated. I’m anxious — where will I be in a year? I’m here, but am I present? And then the breeze in the auto is just perfect, lush greenery of the South, nothing ever goes how I imagine and that’s okay with me. It is a funny thing, feeling so unsettled yet knowing that for whatever reason, I am exactly where I am meant to be.
The apt words of Sahir Ludhianvi reverberate in my mind.
shikaste saaz ki avaz ruhe naghma hai شکست ساز کی آواز روح نغمہ ہے
It is in the ache of the instrument that we find the soul of the song.
It is in the transience of existence that we find its meaning and beauty.
I leave you with these questions, a plea for discernment. How do I feel grounded but not stuck? How do I feel free but not lost? How do I feel grounded and free at the same time?
