Waiting out a summer of longing.

Countless times I have thought to myself - over the last year, and especially over this summer - that I would return to this little oasis of chaos amidst all the plans and schemes and order and regulation that litter the RTU. It is true. I have returned. My tongue, however, is no longer in my cheek.

I agree, I have been a rotten correspondent, and those who primarily reserve interest in my misadventures on the RTU shall no doubt have (or indeed, have had) many reasons for premature festivity. Yes, I have endured the insufferable ignominy of the limelight, the ceaseless and interminable glut of good wishes, and as the circle of celebration closed, I found myself on the outside, without the slightest inclination to join the ranks.

All that passed in my experience for the last 16 months need not warrant description. I did attend the seminar in DC, passed French (mais, bien sûr!), danced at a wedding, lost love, and came to the first major crossing on the RTU. However, to use the words of Coldplay, I was both lost and incomplete, and the palpable need to search my soul incontrovertible. What I expected to find or rediscover I did not know, yet the search symbolised locomotion and I attempted to physically mirror the movement by relocating to Delhi in March.

Lest I wane insolent any further, let me declare that what should have been a personally and professionally rewarding experience turned out, instead, to be an exercise in despondence, drudgery and depression, marked by a mirthless frivolity. I was neither armed with a copy of City of Djinns, nor given a free hand at the tasks that were set for me, and I struggled in the lap of loneliness. This was no solitude of desire or the pallid seclusion of the uninhabited, but the unbearable state of being alone whilst surrounded by patronising extended family, enthusiastic acquaintances, genuinely loving friends, and a disgruntled and curiously confused workplace.

The days consisted of work that no longer interested me, reading texts that no longer captivated me, and spending time with people whose company I desperately tried to enjoy but very rarely met success in doing so. Very soon, I was confronted with a painful fact: I did not know what I was looking for; I was a forlorn face in the crowd, with a lack of objective that was most unexciting. I had thought that a life of un-encumbrance should be a happy development, but it filled me with a weightlessness sprung on which I seemingly floated about, with only the past as the remains of my tether to the earth. And just when I thought my despair was irreparable, my situation beyond rescue, came a chance encounter that flattered to lift the murky clouds obscuring any sense of direction in my pitiful misadventure.

***

The experience of feeling blood course through the veins should be reserved for the finest moments of one's life: it is the only bodily sensation that captures unqualified exhilaration. This expression of the body---normally in the manner of goosebumps, pins and needles, or the quickening or skipping of heartbeats---makes us aware of our own being and caps the completion of an act which finds a coincidence of extraordinary intent and miraculous outcome.

***

I sat, beside myself with surprise, as she tore the piece of paper and handed it to me. “But I'm very busy,” she said without pretence, and indeed she was. Following a personal tragedy which brought me back home for 3 weeks, I returned to Delhi and was granted an audience lasting close to 7 glorious and blissful hours. That night, the fall of the Safavid empire (in the pages of After Tamerlane) suddenly became more engaging, and as I drifted into that wonderful state of suspension between book and sleep, I realised that this endowment of clarity was but the door to a world of inspiration that only awaited a determined explorer.

But how elusive that door turned out to be during the course of the summer! Her departure the next day was met with my own (coincidental, yet willed) pursuit. I understood, however, that the rules of the game, so to say, had been established over our long conversation: the way forward was paved by volition and choice and, therefore, in equal measure (as it were) by chance and circumstance. Long-time readers should remember my, um, loving relationship with that celestial oddity called luck (though things have been a little better, admittedly); this time, too, it smiled radiantly in the opposite direction. Later, as she boarded a flight bound towards the Orient and flew into the night, I was left only with my longing to stare at the stars on the lonely walk back to my flat.

And then there was the waiting: for an update, for an e-mail, a text message. Those few hours in June were seemingly woven into a stream of time that I revisited over and over again, and it kept playing like a strip of film caught cycling in the bioscope of a vacant and restive summer. As the days wore on, the hopes of rain dissipated and the fears of a drought became reality; the oppressive heat of Delhi put a hazy veneer of sultriness in every activity of every lengthy day, slowing things down to a soporific crawl. Waiting had become the zeitgeist of my long summer in the capital, and it conspired to obviate all my attempts to change the pulse of this dreary existence.

Increasingly, I started to evaluate my time in Delhi with its many opportunity costs: the conference in Chicago, the workshop in Berkeley, the discussion group in Toronto. But, perhaps, the biggest disappointment of the summer was being hamstrung by some intractable paperwork and failing to make a trip through tribal Himachal Pradesh and eastern Ladakh into Tibet. Weighed down by the clerical fetish and incessant idiocy of bureaucratic processes, I was left to weather a rainless July that I can now safely claim to be one of the worst months of my life.

I had moved into a house vacated temporarily by its hitherto welcoming occupants, and was suddenly confronted by a tangible representation of the emptiness that had all but consumed me. The waiting resumed unabated and, for someone whose life has been one hospital visit after another since 2002, what followed was not particularly endearing. I had come to a toll booth on the RTU and fulfilling the obligations entailed all manner of medical examinations at government hospitals.

Though I had endured much worse before, the repeated early-morning assault of pestilence as I waited in line or sat in anticipation of receiving results broke the last remaining threads of my already savaged spirit. My loneliness was complete, my isolation impenetrable. My soul was possessed of an epic wait that had pervaded every sinew of my body. I realised that there was nothing more for me to do in that city of cities and packed my bags. Unceremoniously paying my dues, I advanced homeward, and as the massive urban sprawl of Delhi receded into the distance, I sighed in the relief of knowing that, at the very least, I had the steadfast comforts of Calcutta to look forward to.

So what did I learn from this season of misadventures? I learnt that I had gone to Delhi to look for love, but found it sitting on the fence. I am sure, too, that when love found me, I intentionally turned away. I also learnt that I was unprepared for the unreasonableness and conditionality of love. I finally fully understood what Kundera meant by The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and how painful the oscillation between weightlessness and heaviness can be. And I learnt that if one's willing to hope, a piece of paper is all the fortitude one needs.

I learnt that very old lessons are not meant to be passed along as proverbs but lived to be truly understood. I learnt that experience trumps intuition. I learnt that unusual perseverance requires unusual patience. I learnt that patience is not a trait but a habit, which, over lengthy demonstration, is incorrectly identified as a trait. I learnt to distinguish between situations that require giving things a go and those which demand giving things time. Most importantly, I learnt once more to wait; and, as ever throughout the summer, I continue waiting. Because good things take their own sweet time.

Will I wait a lonely lifetime?

If you want me to, I will.