Holding the line

On returning from India, and learning to land when the ground has shifted.

It’s been two weeks now since I got home from India, and it’s been a bumpy landing. People said before I went that it would be tricky coming back to February from tropical heat, and they weren’t wrong. But it’s not just the jet lag, or the weather that’s challenging, it’s something harder to pin down. Thoughts about lines keep rising to the surface like bubbles in a glass of water; holding lines, crossing lines, desire lines; the lines running around and through my life are shifting.

Going from the supermarket to the doctors I look for the desire line which means that I won’t have to walk the way set out for me by engineers and planners, but avoid all of fifty extra steps in the rain.

There it is, a stunted, barely-there line in the grass.

I follow it to a gap in the laurel hedge planted to screen patients on examination couches and staff on their breaks, and push my way through, tripping down the kerb on the other side. This way wasn’t designed for feet, but they’ve found their way anyway.

At home the lines are moving too; the doors no longer fit, swelled by rain, and damp, and time. The markings have worn off the oven and the measuring jug, disorienting me in the everyday; the fridge, kettle and toaster - the mainstays of kitchen life, are all malfunctioning. It feels like an omen. Washing up, the bread board snaps down the middle - one wash, one cut too many - followed by the handle on the cheese grater. Life is unthreading in all kinds of ways.

My body is changing. I am changing.

I don’t know that I any longer trust the solidity of lines, the convention of systems, to carry me. I feel more vulnerable, but an unburdening too, a relief at things becoming simpler. Perhaps, I reason, if I am aware of my own lines, they will be easier to defend.

**

I wake one morning, thinking of churches - the ones in India, in Sawyerpuram, Idaiyangudi, Kochi, and then of a church in rural France - an August evening belonging to another time, my stepmum Vicky and Dad walking between leaning gravestones, pink light, birdsong, his arm around her, she in a patterned dress; inside, the smell of ancient stone and wood; a feeling of unknowing. I think of the ripple of goosebumps that rise on my arms and up my spine each time I wander into a church, of the stillness that settles inside of me. If a church is God’s house, I think to myself, and God is within us, then it must be our house too - a circle of calm drawn inside life’s chaos, a space to connect to the quiet. Perhaps this is religion’s message after all; to connect to each other through stillness.

Each time I sat in a church in India I could feel my great grandfather Sansdosham and my grandfather Victor with me, and the company of unseen ancestors. It’s the same feeling I get standing under a Rain Tree in Kochi as I run my hand over its ancient bark, tracing the girth of its vast trunk, looking up through its canopy to its branches of pink blossom and Brahminy Kites. This is a house too, a home of spirit, as well as a shelter to protect slaves from the heat planted by the Portugese.

**

The sky wasn’t often blue in India and there was a heaviness to the air, but it was alive, rich with movement, colour, smells, and sound. Driving back from Heathrow on a February morning life feels muted - grey and closed and cramped, the weather making people brittle and depressed. In India everything made so much noise - here it feels as if even the birds are quiet, singing genteely, holding something back. I think about lying in the hammock at Kollam, at Ashtamudi Lake, and the growing frenzy of crows and mynah birds at dawn and dusk, their never ending swoops, rustles and bickerings in the fronded canopy.

It has been the longest winter, but spring arrives on a Sunday morning. Out for a walk, people smile and say hello. There’s a feeling of life returning. In a flooded field a flock of seagulls splash in a pool of shimmering water. The sky is blue with cartoon fluffy clouds. Two buzzards hover overhead on the thermals, reminding me of the brahminy kites, crows sit on sheep in the wet fields. Seeing them I feel more in touch with India. My friend Sanal sends me a video of a festival in his village in Allaphuzha. It looks lush and warm, alive and familiar. I want to be there.

But it is glorious here too where the first cherry blossom is out, and there’s the smell of coal fires and people’s Sunday lunches on the breeze. I can hear the wren and robin in the trees. And there are catkins. Life is returning, the wheel turning again. Yellow daffodils are shining on the verges and the daisies are up. Down by the gushing river the periwinkle is flowering. At Shaky Bridge, there’s a huddle of ewes and lambs on a corner of elevated ground. They watch me accusingly as I cross the field with the dog. Through the gate, and there’s a stream where the path usually is. The new wild garlic - ramsons - are untwisting from the sodden earth.

And here I am taking the same photos and noticing the same plants coming out as last year and all the springs before. Here are the snowdrops and little wild daffodils. Here is the cuckoo pint, their tiger-skinned leaves pushing up through the soil, and the dog’s mercury. The dog has found a stick, as he always does, his pink tongue out, his tail wagging, playing the same game again - just as I am.

**

I’m not a seasoned traveller. I haven’t travelled long-haul for decades, and I’m at a point in life where it feels as if things are closing in a bit, perimenopause increasing my anxiety and perception of danger. But I upended myself to travel 5,000 miles away, on my own to India on this emotional pilgrimage, to work on this project, to try to understand this shadow of a story that has coloured my family’s life, even when I couldn’t name how.

And now I must find a way to shape it - all this material, emotional and physical, that I’ve collected. It feels like sitting down to make a 2000 piece jigsaw puzzle - setting out to find the corners, and making the pieces as I go.

Perhaps I’ll never make sense of it. Perhaps I’m just trying to draw a line of calm inside the chaos, to construct a house without taking my pen off the page.