oh where have you been, my blue-eyed son

ten toes in

My relationship with India has always been what is politely referred to as complex: it’s where my genetic material originates, but it never felt like a place I belonged.

Maybe being born in Enfield, Middlesex resulted in some kind of base-level neural imprinting, like when newborn geese decide their human carer is their mother.

Or maybe it was my parents, with their ‘western’, progressive values honed to a sharp edge by Imperial College and the Royal Academy, that they put into practice by returning to India to join the Maoist revolution, when I was just two years old.

Or maybe it was Enid Blyton.

In an earlier post I made a semi-serious joke about “type 1” and “type 2” India, and how “type 1” either pities or ignores “type 2”. If that was the case, I was “type X” - the type that finds the whole “type 1 vs type 2” thing unbearable on a cellular level, and just wants to get the hell out. Which was what happened in 1983 when my parents, by then post their Maoist phase, got posted to London.

exit planet dust

After my formative years in the Indian cities of Chandigarh, Pune and Bombay, London was a shock, the way surfacing from underwater and breathing air for the first time is a shock.

For this, gentle reader, was the record that was number one in the UK that week:

I’m not trying to promote Kajagoogoo as some kind of paragon of musical achievement (well, OK, I kind of am) - but it was an incredibly efficient communication from a different world: one where high technology put to the service of artistic and personal freedom by two-toned-mullet-wearing rebels could produce both economic success and cultural clout.

At the tender age of ten and three quarters, I couldn’t put this into words, but I didn’t need to. This was a world I instinctively felt I belonged to; somewhere around the moment in the song where the instrumental bridge yields to the final chorus, I decided that this was where, and more importantly how, I was going to live my life.

And thus, despite the odd unplanned interruption (at an Indian military boarding school and a university in upstate New York), has it come to pass.

wait a minute

Having established the principle of making life-altering decisions based on pop songs, consider the following addition to the oeuvre:

It would be overstating only slightly to call this the catalyst that finally tipped me over the edge from wanting to someday visit Bangalore, to actually booking a ticket.

In three minutes and fifty-four seconds, this guy called Sooraj Cherukut, twenty years younger than me, raised in Houston Texas but returnee to Coimbatore, who walked the plank off the good ship Goldman Sachs to become a rapper named after a monkey deity, managed to communicate the essence of a new way (new to me, anyway) of looking at, being in, and interacting with, India. One that doesn’t hanker for type-1 nor despair at type-2, but looks at them both through clear eyes, without judgement or sentimentality, and finds something worthy of respect.

It was time for me to find my own independent relationship with India: and thus, despite the odd unplanned excursion, has it come to pass.

changes

On the road from Dehradun down to Delhi, my father asked me whether I thought India had changed in the five years since I last travelled there.

I looked out of the window at the ever-unfolding pageant - packs of stray dogs, great gouts of plastic waste everywhere, the sun reduced to a ghost by the smog, huge billboards advertising cars and jewelry, roadside vendors accepting electronic payment, children begging in the dust at the windows of BMWs, the whole nine yards - and I had to answer, no it has not.

But what has changed is me.

Waiting for my flight back to London, I was seized by an unfamiliar emotion, one that brought a lump to my throat: I was sorry to be leaving.

I think that means I’ll be back.