A old story revised
Where she came from everyone lived high up, where gravity had the least pull on the ambitions of men and the skins of women. Everyone got used to seeing things from a great height and everything looked tiny and ant like. Everything was scaled down to dots and resembled pixels in a low grade image on the computer. Nothing was very threatening when everything was so small. But back then she was never afraid of the view outside her window on the 42nd floor. She could see all the way to the sea and moving dots of lights like some high-tech impressionist painting. That is how Harry Potter's world would look like if it had been modernized. And she could almost believe she was floating in a the air while she peeked at her neighbors at their dinner table. The space which divides one family from the next is an arm length fall of 42 floors. The curtains could never shut out the sound of conversations at their dinner tables and her family had to make sure they speak loud enough to cover up the intruding voices of the neighbors. Elevators were always a chore. Jam-packed with people in suits and briefcases every morning. It is the one time everyone from all those different units meet reluctantly for that three minutes of unwanted physical closeness. Being in elevators everyone held their breaths and if they spoke spoke in whispers. An anxious experience with a horrible mixture of colognes and perfumes and trances of breakfasts. She had always thought everyone and everything seemed especially grey and silent, Even though television sets were constantly left blaring on purpose to keep silence at bay.
Now she lives unbelievably close to the ground. Her concept of space seemed to have lost a whole dimension. Everything is larger-than-life. The people on the bus were especially loud, colorful and real. The grey muffled skin around her world has been rudely stripped away. She now saw stretches of sky uninterrupted. She missed the sky back home--always incomplete and cut off at an angle and she had always felt so much closer to the stars even though the glare of the city lights blocked out all views of them. Now she was so ground bound. She always had to look up because there was not much to discover looking down. It is just the ground beneath her feet. Colors are so solid and full here, it lacked that indistinct in-betweenness back home, it is as if her grey filter has been removed. The noise saturated silence is replaced by genuine sounds of people's ceaseless bubbly chattering. The full bodied stimulants of the new place seemed jarring to her senses in a way that was not totally unpleasant.
People always like to ask her, what does she miss back home? Her friends perhaps? Speaking her own language without the intrusion of a funny accent that people will detect as foreign and place her as an outsider. She never quite know what to answer. How can she tell them that she has lost a whole way of looking at things. A whole spatial dimension is missing and her color palette has been meddled with so that a certain indistinct misty grey has gone missing replaced by assertive colors more certain of themselves.
She was not unhappy. But neither can she remember the last time she was happy. Happiness seemed to have a double shadow now, she found herself trying to pin the tricky bastard down, fix him to make him stay. She had the same voice, the same laughter, the same sense of humor, but yet somehow something has changed. The worst thing about the change is she don't know what is different, so she can't remedy it.
She hated the words migrant and immigrant and still does. Such an ugly sounding words. Pronouncing them, one had to use an extra effort at the "grunt!" part of the words. It is strenuous and forced like the smile she pastes on herself at Chinese New Year. How she could never speak to her relatives for fear that her smile would fall apart and she would have to spend time putting the crumbles together back into its monstrous form. So she stuffed herself with food. As long as one's mouth is full, no one blames them for their silence. So it is the silence she relishes. The silence of being a third-party, an outsider. She talks to her friends from home and suddenly this silence catches up when the unindentifable change rears its ugly head. It is also the silence which falls quite suddenly like a blade when she converses with someone and her alienness makes everything awkward.
People congratulate her on being bilingual. Excitable Aunts explain the opportunities this special skill can offer. And everyone nod their heads in agreement that knowing English prior to her move here is an advantage. "See how fast she has adapted here?" What they cannot see is that it is so terrible to be in between. Neither here nor there. She felt sea-sick all the time. She feels like a fish out of water, struggling to breathe, all the while feeling her distance from the sea. She also feels like a freak. An amphibian of sorts--expected to straddle the two land, but finding that she now belonged in neither.
This strange new world she was now in seemed to be constantly floating on water. She wondered when she would feel grounded and attached to the land beneath her feet once again. Days went by in a haze, nothing seemed very real or significant. She has moved into her new home, a little house at the outskirts of the city where she lived side by side with people like her whose everyday struggle was to make themselves understood. It constantly surprised her that this was now her new home. The word home just didn't make any sense even though everyone was the same, her sister still walked around home in her underwear, her father still got angry when he had to wait too long for dinner, but everything was changed. She felt barren like her backyard where nothing grew except for weeds. She dug beneath the weeds once, and found that the garden was full of sandy soil, the kind that nothing, except for weeds, would grow on. Even though she had once loved plants and gardening, the backyard--the hidden desert could not interest her.
It was when she was out strolling on the beach which she found too cold, the sand too pale, the waves too icy to run and jump into that she found the coconut. She marveled at it, at its strangeness, at how out of place it was. A tropical fruit in this cold city which still freezes in the summer. It was being tossed around by the waves next to the stranded jellyfish. How could she describe the way she felt towards that coconut bobbing clumsily in the waves. She felt she saw herself right there in the waves, trying to stay afloat. At that moment she had no doubt that she was that coconut, and that coconut was her and that their fates were tied together.
She took the coconut home, she wanted to give it a chance to survive, a place for it to grow roots. The coconut soon became an obsession even she could not explain. She needed it to grow, she needed it to survive. She would water it several times a day knowing that the dryness of the city worked against the coconut which needed humidity. She would wait anxiously to spot signs of a new shoot which would give her the strength she needed in the new place. But weeks passed and nothing grew. The spot in the garden where she had cleared the weeds and careful dug a hole in the ground was the same as when she had first planted the coconut. Months passed, at first her family had been happy she had taken a new interest in the garden. Now they worry about how bitterly disappointed she was, and how she did little other than spending hours tending the coconut which never grew.
The days grew cold and grey, miserable rains came, then the days became dry and brittle, the cold air stung one's nostrils when one breathed. Then miraculously the days started getting warm again, the skies turned its brilliant blue again. Everywhere else, flowers bloomed.
One lovely day, her sister came out to the garden where she still sat waiting. She told her there was a place she needed to see. Taking her by the hand, her sister brought her to a plant nursery where everything was just beginning to bloom. They wandered among rows and rows of plants and flowers, a haze of scent and colors. Together, they picked out a young sapling, they hoped, one day would become a peach tree. Back in their garden, they went back to that same spot where the coconut tree never grew. They dug into the soil now soft, moist and ready for life, Removed the coconut, unchanged as on the day she found it. Placed the sapling in the hole and then covered its roots with soil. Standing, their hands muddy, they looked at the earth so full of promise, so full of life.
Where she came from everyone lived high up, where gravity had the least pull on the ambitions of men and the skins of women. Everyone got used to seeing things from a great height and everything looked tiny and ant like. Everything was scaled down to dots and resembled pixels in a low grade image on the computer. Nothing was very threatening when everything was so small. But back then she was never afraid of the view outside her window on the 42nd floor. She could see all the way to the sea and moving dots of lights like some high-tech impressionist painting. That is how Harry Potter's world would look like if it had been modernized. And she could almost believe she was floating in a the air while she peeked at her neighbors at their dinner table. The space which divides one family from the next is an arm length fall of 42 floors. The curtains could never shut out the sound of conversations at their dinner tables and her family had to make sure they speak loud enough to cover up the intruding voices of the neighbors. Elevators were always a chore. Jam-packed with people in suits and briefcases every morning. It is the one time everyone from all those different units meet reluctantly for that three minutes of unwanted physical closeness. Being in elevators everyone held their breaths and if they spoke spoke in whispers. An anxious experience with a horrible mixture of colognes and perfumes and trances of breakfasts. She had always thought everyone and everything seemed especially grey and silent, Even though television sets were constantly left blaring on purpose to keep silence at bay.
Now she lives unbelievably close to the ground. Her concept of space seemed to have lost a whole dimension. Everything is larger-than-life. The people on the bus were especially loud, colorful and real. The grey muffled skin around her world has been rudely stripped away. She now saw stretches of sky uninterrupted. She missed the sky back home--always incomplete and cut off at an angle and she had always felt so much closer to the stars even though the glare of the city lights blocked out all views of them. Now she was so ground bound. She always had to look up because there was not much to discover looking down. It is just the ground beneath her feet. Colors are so solid and full here, it lacked that indistinct in-betweenness back home, it is as if her grey filter has been removed. The noise saturated silence is replaced by genuine sounds of people's ceaseless bubbly chattering. The full bodied stimulants of the new place seemed jarring to her senses in a way that was not totally unpleasant.
People always like to ask her, what does she miss back home? Her friends perhaps? Speaking her own language without the intrusion of a funny accent that people will detect as foreign and place her as an outsider. She never quite know what to answer. How can she tell them that she has lost a whole way of looking at things. A whole spatial dimension is missing and her color palette has been meddled with so that a certain indistinct misty grey has gone missing replaced by assertive colors more certain of themselves.
She was not unhappy. But neither can she remember the last time she was happy. Happiness seemed to have a double shadow now, she found herself trying to pin the tricky bastard down, fix him to make him stay. She had the same voice, the same laughter, the same sense of humor, but yet somehow something has changed. The worst thing about the change is she don't know what is different, so she can't remedy it.
She hated the words migrant and immigrant and still does. Such an ugly sounding words. Pronouncing them, one had to use an extra effort at the "grunt!" part of the words. It is strenuous and forced like the smile she pastes on herself at Chinese New Year. How she could never speak to her relatives for fear that her smile would fall apart and she would have to spend time putting the crumbles together back into its monstrous form. So she stuffed herself with food. As long as one's mouth is full, no one blames them for their silence. So it is the silence she relishes. The silence of being a third-party, an outsider. She talks to her friends from home and suddenly this silence catches up when the unindentifable change rears its ugly head. It is also the silence which falls quite suddenly like a blade when she converses with someone and her alienness makes everything awkward.
People congratulate her on being bilingual. Excitable Aunts explain the opportunities this special skill can offer. And everyone nod their heads in agreement that knowing English prior to her move here is an advantage. "See how fast she has adapted here?" What they cannot see is that it is so terrible to be in between. Neither here nor there. She felt sea-sick all the time. She feels like a fish out of water, struggling to breathe, all the while feeling her distance from the sea. She also feels like a freak. An amphibian of sorts--expected to straddle the two land, but finding that she now belonged in neither.
This strange new world she was now in seemed to be constantly floating on water. She wondered when she would feel grounded and attached to the land beneath her feet once again. Days went by in a haze, nothing seemed very real or significant. She has moved into her new home, a little house at the outskirts of the city where she lived side by side with people like her whose everyday struggle was to make themselves understood. It constantly surprised her that this was now her new home. The word home just didn't make any sense even though everyone was the same, her sister still walked around home in her underwear, her father still got angry when he had to wait too long for dinner, but everything was changed. She felt barren like her backyard where nothing grew except for weeds. She dug beneath the weeds once, and found that the garden was full of sandy soil, the kind that nothing, except for weeds, would grow on. Even though she had once loved plants and gardening, the backyard--the hidden desert could not interest her.
It was when she was out strolling on the beach which she found too cold, the sand too pale, the waves too icy to run and jump into that she found the coconut. She marveled at it, at its strangeness, at how out of place it was. A tropical fruit in this cold city which still freezes in the summer. It was being tossed around by the waves next to the stranded jellyfish. How could she describe the way she felt towards that coconut bobbing clumsily in the waves. She felt she saw herself right there in the waves, trying to stay afloat. At that moment she had no doubt that she was that coconut, and that coconut was her and that their fates were tied together.
She took the coconut home, she wanted to give it a chance to survive, a place for it to grow roots. The coconut soon became an obsession even she could not explain. She needed it to grow, she needed it to survive. She would water it several times a day knowing that the dryness of the city worked against the coconut which needed humidity. She would wait anxiously to spot signs of a new shoot which would give her the strength she needed in the new place. But weeks passed and nothing grew. The spot in the garden where she had cleared the weeds and careful dug a hole in the ground was the same as when she had first planted the coconut. Months passed, at first her family had been happy she had taken a new interest in the garden. Now they worry about how bitterly disappointed she was, and how she did little other than spending hours tending the coconut which never grew.
The days grew cold and grey, miserable rains came, then the days became dry and brittle, the cold air stung one's nostrils when one breathed. Then miraculously the days started getting warm again, the skies turned its brilliant blue again. Everywhere else, flowers bloomed.
One lovely day, her sister came out to the garden where she still sat waiting. She told her there was a place she needed to see. Taking her by the hand, her sister brought her to a plant nursery where everything was just beginning to bloom. They wandered among rows and rows of plants and flowers, a haze of scent and colors. Together, they picked out a young sapling, they hoped, one day would become a peach tree. Back in their garden, they went back to that same spot where the coconut tree never grew. They dug into the soil now soft, moist and ready for life, Removed the coconut, unchanged as on the day she found it. Placed the sapling in the hole and then covered its roots with soil. Standing, their hands muddy, they looked at the earth so full of promise, so full of life.
posted by Nippy at 1:01 AM
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