LILA RAJIVA: The Mind-Body Politic

Libertarian Living: Expat Belonging

December 7, 2009

Tags: belonging, exile, expat, Libertarian living, travel
Posted in: Art and Ideas, Libertarian living, Writing

My first year as an expat. Come New Year and I will have done the necessary time outside the country.

I must say it´s a relief. At the best of times I never quite fit into America, although I think I fit in better there than I would ever have fit into India…but I´ll never know, since I left India as a student.

Honestly, I think I wouldn´t really fit into any country, except as an observer of sorts. A kind of partial citizen. That´s me. I spend a lot of my time alone, because people tire me out. Yet I like them around me anonymously…. preferably talking a language I don´t understand.

Loren Eisely, the anthropologist, once wrote somewhere in some essay of his that he liked spending time by himself in dark theaters (or was it bars?). I´m like that.

I like a seat in the corner of a crowded restaurant or lobby where I can watch people. The current of voices, as long as it doesn´t impinge too much on my thoughts, soothes me. A  dark hum of water whirring around me. A kind of return to the womb.

Airport lounges…small coffee shops, one-star hotels with wooden cupboards that tilt precariously when you open them late at night…unfamiliar streets that open up suddenly as you turn a corner ..a grey sea… I feel at home around  them.  Anonymity seems to make my own self clearer to me. In a group of friends, on the other hand, I lose a sense of who I am.

People yearn to belong somewhere. I spend my time elaborating ways of not belonging. And when I begin to feel at home, it´s always a warning sign that soon, very soon, I will want to leave.