‘All of Life is a Foreign Country’

The first time I went abroad, UK, in 1985, I travelled British Airways which had a one and a half hour halt at Dubai. The moment the plane landed, I noticed a sudden exodus of passengers to the doors. When enquired, I found out that Dubai was a duty-free port and everyone was rushing to buy alcohol and cigarettes. I wondered why people chose to buy their scotch and smoke there when Britain was the home of these products.

The evening I reached London, I went out to buy something for dinner and discovered that I could not communicate with any of the pubs or the corner shops because I didn’t understand their language. I thought I knew some English, but wondered what language those people were speaking.

Later, after settling down a bit in the new country, I was travelling one day by the city bus, when it suddenly stopped at the red light. Since I was standing close to the door, I asked the driver if I could get down there as my destination was closer from that point. The driver gave me an ugly look and asked if I had insurance in that country. I couldn’t get why he was upset and why I could not get down at that point as it was such a common thing back home.

Many years later, again when I was in Reno, USA, I tried to cross the road, when, suddenly, my friend pulled me back and told me that there was a fine of $50 for jaywalking. I knew walking, but what was jaywalking and why should anyone be fined for walking. Aren’t these foreign countries funny, strange and difficult to manage? Of course, they are.

But that’s what I thought until I came across Jack Kerouac’s famous line ‘All of life is a foreign country.’ It is not in foreign countries that we come across strange new things, but in our homeland and in everyday life too. India is a hugely diverse country with hundreds of languages, tribes, and weird customs. The foreigners find our spicy food, chaotic traffic, stray animals on the roads, our happy co-existence with garbage and open defecation very strange and hard to put up with. It is natural if, as a foreigner, you find life in other places funny and outlandish. But what, indeed, came as a revelation to me was that you can be a stranger even in your own country. Surprises and hardships never leave you.    .

Many years ago, I and a couple of other teachers were invited to a dinner by an elderly kind Principal at a remote college in Tamil Nadu. After a brief chat, we were inducted into the dining area where four neatly spread-out banana leaves on the floor, dotted with a dozen tiny heaps of various veggies and chutneys awaited us. No sooner did the rice service started, I found myself fumbling to handle the meal without a spoon. When I asked for one, my host surprised me by telling there was none in the house. The nearest thing that he could hesitantly produce was a serving spoon, which I used clumsily to the delight of everyone in the party. On another occasion, on a trip to the Araku valley, we stopped at a Friday haat to see the tribal way of life. To my surprise, there were several stalls where women had glass jars full of common red army ants for sale. When I asked about it, I was shocked to know that these little creatures were crushed and ingested as a medicine to get rid of malaria or any other fever. Despite my frequent visits, short and long, to Hyderabad, I have not been able to understand the common headshake of the people. Instead of nodding, they prefer to wobble their head sideways to say ‘yes’ or ‘I agree’, To much of the people in the north this horizontal head movement means ‘no’.

Life, no doubt, is surprises galore, but at the same time it never ceases to offer strange new hardships that we have to, like a foreigner, learn to manage and live with. Uncertainties, lifestyle changes and shifting priorities keep popping up new challenges all the time and make us feel like a newcomer and alien in our own life. Every challenge is a new territory which we have to traverse with a lot of caution and trepidation just as we do when we are in new geographies.

If childhood brought me a new challenge of how to learn to ride a bicycle, then the later years persisted with the same fear and unpreparedness when I learnt to drive a motorbike or car. If in childhood I was able to master the mechanical art of wielding a reed pen, and later a fountain or a ball pen, then suddenly there came up a keyboard, an electronic pen and a mouse to pelt me with new challenges. If at first, I learnt to speak and converse with others and later trained myself for the wacky art of public speaking, even then my ordeals were not over. With the onset of Corona I am forced to learn to speak in a void (they call it virtual space) staring at a chequered screen with no real audience or interaction – a bit of an insane act. If in childhood I outplayed my mates with strong legs and puffy lungs by playing ball, bat or racket games, then now I have to learn to make my fingers nimble and run them fast on a gaming console without moving a leg. If at any stage, I thought I had learnt enough in life to feel settled then I was wrong.  Life remains unsettled, foreign forever.

As a young man, after watching a countless films, I thought I was ready for romance and love but found to my chagrin that the girl I wanted did not want me or the romance that I had imagined was not exactly on her menu. Every Indian film with whatever upheavals in romance ends in marriage as if marriage is the end of all troubles. With such naïve ideas in mind I got married only to discover that marriage is as much hard work as romance. Living together is not the same as singing a duet together, though both need a lot of training. Life keeps challenging and landing us on unfamiliar grounds. Parenting, career, old age, disasters, diseases, deaths keep us on tenterhooks and never let us feel settled or at home. Corona pandemic has bound us to our homes, but do we feel at home? Our home has become a foreign country.

Next time if you find someone lost, get it, he may be in an alien territory.

Or on a river, as Munir Niazi says poetically

ik aur dariya ka samna tha ‘munir’ mujh ko

main ek dariya ke paar utra to maine dekha

(I was faced with another river, I discovered, after I crossed one)