Skip to main content

Learning Function

Strange thoughts can cross my mind in a hotel bathroom after a long flight. It is that moment when the world fades out in the gathering darkness of a strange city and all that matters is a warm shower before going to bed. The shower is so futuristic that no matter which way you turn the shower head refuses to activate. The water flows into the tub and out of reach, alternating between cold and hot. 

 I sit on the edge and soak my feet resigned to give up and go to bed grimy from long day. I don't want to call the front desk and present myself an idiot needing help turning on the shower. I wonder if anyone else in this hotel is struggling just as I am. If unlike me they have the courage to ask for help. What separates someone like me from those who can magically grasp the secrets of strange faucets and get them to yield water at will. Am I all alone in this.

Events like this take me back to my college days when I was struggling with engineering drawing unlike anyone else I knew. Is there a part of my brain that is undeveloped and therefore, I simply do not see what is obvious to others. I have similarly struggled with doors and locks that need something beyond what is "normal" to open. Each such incident brings in its wake a feeling of time standing still and gathering weight as it does. Nothing will move to moment forward to the next step - to that instant when the door opens, the faucet starts to flow, the shower sprays warm water and so on. I did figure out the shower that night but it was an interminable passage of time.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

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...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more

Reading Shantaram

I finished listening to Shantaram on audiobook after several weekends of being absorbed in the story. This book had been on my to-read list for a long time and I am glad I chose the audio version of it. It is an extraordinary story teeming with colorful characters and rich detail. As an Indian who is a stranger to Mumbai and Maharashtra in that I have never spent years of my life there. I have to rely on what I know second hand. As a fan Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance, where in my mind I imagined the action taking place in Mumbai, this book was a chance for me to know the city through another author even if an Australian.  The author,  Gregory David Roberts comes across as someone who is able to see the soul of India through all that ails it. And in connecting with that soul, he finds some answers to his life's hard questions. India does not save him but it keeps his soul alive and striving. Most of his experiences would be unrelatable to the average person who lives a far m...
Post a Comment
Read more