Unsolicited enmities

Monsoon has a way of finding me on my knees and also considerably helpless. Two weeks into the first semester of my tenth grade, I fall sick (again). I’m only partially surprised about this whole ordeal because the universe has me convinced that it has a pattern constructed for me where it entertains itself by blasting a completely impossiblechallenge right in my face every single rainy season. I speak from experience. It’s always something rare, unexpected and sometimes even unheard of that I’m diagnosed with and wow, I’m back at home for an unspecified period of time. Again.

I would lay in the school’s medical unit with my head in my hands, my ears ringing from the relentless calls of the matron for dinner. I hated eating Wednesday Pav Bhaji in the MU, because it tasted like bricks and that night, as I tried my best to delay the consumption of such questionable comestibles, I dreamt of home and the endless possibilities of nameless buttery concoctions my mother would have prepared had I been home in this state. My brain was still in the world of Barcelona from the book I had been reading, back in the 1945 when I hadn’t even existed, when the streets sold hats and watches individually and ethnically. I yearned to get out of here and visit my own version of some library of forbidden books I could read for my entire life but—

That was me from two weeks ago when I was exhausted of my unknown illness and desperate to get a taste of freedom after days inside the isolating, nondescript and drab walls of the MU. Now, I’m in the lap of complete civilization under the shelter of a well-functioning air conditioner, typing away on a laptop screen instead. Days are faster here and yet, more relaxed. I have achieved my mother’s healing potions and dishes of unimaginable relish and the comfort of music and the internet as a whole. 

This whole affair of moving from town to hilltop makes me question my existence- not only in the way of the existentialist but also more materialistically. What makes me so different in both places- how am I a netizen at home but a hermit in school? How can I adapt to the lack of Wi-Fi on the hilltop when I live on it here, at home? How am I two different people in two places? Can I live in only one?

Answers to some of these questions make me shudder and I realize that I don’t actually know what I would do if I had to live in the either place the entire year. Despite all the opportunities and luxury at home, I cannot imagine never feeling the wind on my face or the searing sun on my skin or the stinging bite of the mosquitoes at night or just the tranquil presence of nature. Both of these personalities of mine make me a person as a whole, without either I would only exist as half of myself.