My English teacher introduced me Cadbury's Book of Chidren's Poetry turning poetry completely real and accessible. These kids were not writing of The Lady Of Shallot or Lord Lochinvar. Our worlds were much the same. Their vocabulary was no bigger than mine and yet they had perceived something that I had completely missed.
Reading that book turned me aware of my thoughts, the flow of life around me and suddenly poetry was everywhere. I wrote the first tentative verses stumbling with familiar words in their new context like it were a foreign language.
Between feeling and expression there is an asymptotic gap never quite meeting except at infinity. Sometimes a child will reach infinity with the ease of a genius like Pablo Neruda.
Years later I would be charmed by Poetry in Motion in the Metro on the way to work. At a time when I was hurting so much that I was desensitized to any feeling except pain, a chance verse would make me want to be alive once again.
An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
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