Thursday, Feburary 25, 2021
West Chester, PA
Dear Prea,
It has been so long since you wrote your last letter, I am ashamed that it took me this much time to reply. LOTS has happened since your letter, but I know that’s no real reason not to write. As a recap, since you last wrote me, we got the West Chester house, moved in (on the 31st of December, to spend New Year’s Eve here, which was really special), and started furnishing this place (we’re already almost done — just the basement and the library left to go, and we’ve already got a beautiful rug and two armchairs AND A PIANO for the library, and the pockey table has arrived for the basement!); the new semester started, in which I am teaching a new course called Origins of Indic Thought along with my regular Sanskrit Grammar class, and you have gotten some much needed time off to finish your dissertation; we submitted several papers and things that were due over the winter break; and we are now beginning to plan for the summer… Needless to say, we’ve been busy, and our new house has already turned into a beautiful home.
Your letter was so beautiful, it made me tear up. You referenced the Hobbit, and how material things connect people, which is so true, and so often overlooked when we devalue our material realities for various reasons. These connections and interrelations are ultimately what make every home what it is, and the material structures that form around those connections are repositories of those connections over time. The same can be said of our bodies too, perhaps, as the physical structures surrounding our minds. I heard of this book called The Body Keeps the Score a while ago and I’m reminded of that here. The body is a material thing that maintains a record of all the things that happen to us over the course of our lives, and through our body we can learn our own psychological histories, both conscious and subconscious. What a beautiful and terrifying concept. It can be difficult to deal with if we have been faced with trauma in our lives. Trauma can even be passed on from one generation to the next, simply through our bodies being the physical embodiment of the history of every generation before us. Consider the history of things like indentureship, or the partition of India, or slavery, or any number of traumatic events. They all live in us every day.
I think of home as a story, filled with the moments and interactions of so many people who have been in it. Every person has a different story, a different home, filled with so many people and things and memories. But when you make a home with someone, as we have begun to do, then the threads of the stories involved become so intertwined with each other after a point that they cannot be distinguished from one another. Now, despite all that has happened in my life – all the travels, the adventures, the people, the victories and mishaps – my story, my home, is forever intertwined with yours. From the moment we decided to be together forever, my home became you. And Prem. Our little family. And our story is being written moment to moment. As you say, each dent, nick, addition, trimmed tree, tells and will tell stories of various moments, and that is a beautiful thing.
Your story of the time since you left your house sounds traumatic and difficult, and was certainly filled with struggle, although it made you who you are now. Despite all the pain and turmoil you encountered, you emerged as a beautiful being with some of the highest levels of compassion and empathy I have ever seen. You also devoted a lot of attention to your academic work, since that seems to have been a kind of refuge for you while living in the situations you were in over the last decade, which has developed in you one of the sharpest critical lenses I have ever come across. I’m sure you were a person with those qualities even before you left home, but those aspects of you got refined and sharpened to the point that now you are naturally an extreme adept and even a savant in the empathy, compassion, and critical thinking departments. These are some of the qualities that drew me to you in the first place, and continue to draw me to you today.
You asked how living away from home for so long changed me. Well, I left home when I was 17, and who I was before that was a child at best. I was a very protected child by all accounts, and even when I left home, aside from my academics, everything came relatively easy to me (not in terms of my ability, but my opportunity to do it). Still, I never felt like I was away from home. I made every place I was in my home. At that time, I was very charmed by the life that Vedanta valorizes – that of the wandering ascetic. I was all about traveling, adventuring (but never any drugs or alcohol), music, dance, philosophy, and chilling.
Perhaps as a result of this, I was a little resentful, or angry, that my friends were living “normal”, college-y lives, doing fun things that I was somehow morally opposed to. I knew they were fun, I just couldn’t bring myself to do them. I was an angry young man. So, my undergrad years went by and I harbored this weird resentment, which I thought I could get over by traveling like a madman. So I did. Part of living away from “home” in the Naperville sense since I was quite young was that my feeling of being at home was never compromised no matter how much I moved around.
I went to the furthest reaches of India’s jungles, searching, searching, searching for meaning, something that would make me unique and cool. Sounds kind of dumb, but I was certainly motivated by the prospect of being unique. Now I know that that whole idea of “searching for meaning” is so privileged, so careless, so silly, and yet, without that drive, I never would have come to stop being “angry” the way I was, or to learn about what it means to care for the material realities of others while pursuing the values of equality and justice and freedom with my work in the world. I never would have met you, or been open to learning from you the way I am now. I wouldn’t have become who I am.
I was searching for home. I was searching for somewhere I belonged. Looking for people like me, a community I could be part of. I thought America wasn’t the place for me, I was brown, and this was a white country. I traveled around India, thinking that this was my roots, this is where I belonged, these were my people, but all I found was a foreign culture that chewed me up and spit me out. I went to the UK, and despite finding intellectual community for the first time in Cambridge, I didn’t like the country, they seemed to speak the language I did but it wasn’t the same at all. It wasn’t for me. I went back to India thinking perhaps I can live there. But I didn’t belong there at the end of the day. I learned what I could, I grew a lot, I faced whatever difficulty came my way head on, but I didn’t belong. I wasn’t meant to stay there, as you remember from our conversations when I was in Kerala.
I came back to America thinking this is my home after all. But no, despite being intimately familiar with this way of life, and being surrounded by people who speak my language, I realized that after learning and growing so much around the world, becoming a man for the first time outside of this land, and reading about what this society is made of, what it is built on, I couldn’t relate to its culture. I experienced reverse culture shock, I suppose. It wasn’t what I thought it would be. And in the process, I even gave up my Hindu identity due to various things I learned along the way about caste and misogyny in the tradition along with conversations I had with my friends and colleagues. However, through this all, I was lucky that you and I remained friends.
In the last few years, I have found intellectual community in reading groups and discussion circles, and I have been closer than ever to my family, but I no longer seek some kind of “belonging” in the generic sense of the word. I think I have grown to realize that everyone is on their own individual path, and belonging can be found in more ways than one, but for people with our kinds of backgrounds, it is probably not going to be from living in a particular place. That said, I am lucky that my parents and brother are so loving and so supportive of everything I have ever done and likely will ever do. They are an unfailing source of strength and support. Sometimes the family we are born with end up being the best blessing you could ask for to start off your life. A very fortunate kind of capital, as Bourdieu would say.
Ultimately, after all of the above, where I have found the deepest sense of belonging and community is with you, right here, or wherever we end up being. It doesn’t matter. With you, I feel at home in all the senses of the word. Whether I was seeking it or not, I have found a place where I truly belong, because I am accepted for who I am completely and without judgment. This is a haven for me where I don’t have to privilege one identity over another in order to fit in or to relate. I can just be me, and you can just be you, and together we can just be at home. My favorite memories of home are being made here, every day, all the time.
How are you liking our new house? Are you happy? Are you comfortable? What would you like to do next?
I love you forever,
Varun