This must be the shortest that I lived in any space, as the one I recently left behind in the beautiful village of Chandor, in Goa. But am I relieved to be out of there! oh dear, seriously- what a relief! It was just a befitting case of ‘from the frying pan to the fire’. The home before that, the one in Faridabad, where we lived for six and a half years is our own, to the extent we still ‘own’ the house, but this was the first rented house I hired for myself, and just as lonely and desolate a spot as could be. Though it gave me the satisfaction of being in a beautiful place, it never went a long way with that emotion- it was too lonely a place.
When you come to a new country, you do want to be relatively in the midst of things, or close by so that you can partake of whatever life it is that the new place offers. IN that location I could simply never never do it. Coming out to a new part of the country was difficult as it is, being in a small, back-of-the-beyond place did nothing to help me in any way. But I cannot but acknowledge with greatest gratitude the kindness of my neighbours- Hyginus (who was my landlord) and Joanita (immediate neighbour in whose yard numerous cats, fowls and pigs roam).
Now we have moved to the outskirts of Margao, a prominent city of the Southern part of Goa- a noisy, hustling, warm and slothful city just the way the entire Goa could be seen. However, because it is a city and not the country anymore, life is a little more pacy, active and energetic.
These days I find myself without a camera and other problems of this new location are so numerous that it makes me worry whether life here is even sustainable, notwithstanding the kindness of the landlord. The phone lines are just struck, on their route to being transferred from the village- the phone provider does not supply phone lines to this neighbourhood. I would have to go and meet the General Manager, telephones to discuss this issue. These are what I call the structural bottlenecks of living in smaller places in India- the slap of difficult attitudes about thigns as small, shall I say inane, as phone/internet connections.
As of now, which is nearly more than three weeks of my moving into the new home, for reasons of the phones I am extremely exasperated; for several other reasons, though’ I am somewhat happy and for some uncorrelated reasons (that come from the professional and academic domains) I am perplexed. Keeping my fingers crossed that this new place will be something conducive to my work and future. Much as I would like to, I do not have a device yet to click pictures of the green hill that is there right ahead of my house, and which I can see every time I look out of my eastern windows and doors- both on the ground and the first floors of this new house in Cupangale.