LESSONS FROM HOME

I’ve been away from home for twenty-six weeks. Almost everything is just as it was and that means my husband and I are at loggerheads once again.

My friend entered our backyard in Saratoga, California, two weeks ago to lop off a banana leaf from our tree for her prayer ceremony. I knew Shanthi was out and about because I’d been alerted to her presence by our security camera. I asked her how our yard looked. It looked okay, she said. “But it does look neglected, you know, as though there’s no one at home,” she added, as an afterthought.

Every other day, I watched my garden from Singapore through our camera. Even when a crow shimmied about in the yard, it triggered the system. I missed our home whenever I caught a glimpse of a cat or a squirrel or a human being on video. The camera was a reminder that I must worry about our plants. It was obvious that our gardener had stopped paying attention to the yard because no one was paying attention to him.

Last Monday, when our airport shuttle turned into our driveway, I was dismayed. The Japanese maple by my office window reminded me of a New Zealand sheep begging to be sheared. The roses needed deadheading. Gophers pockmarked our lawn. The cacti in the pots in our front yard looked as unwelcoming as a durian at a Chanel store. When I entered our house, I heard the call of my favorite dracaena fragrans. It looked mournfully at me from its yellowing tips. It needed love; most of all, it was aching for some of Singapore’s oppressive humidity.

Since our arrival at home, both my husband and I have been roaming about the rooms like zombies, grimacing at the strange tastelessness of Californian tap water and subsisting on a scant amount of sleep. Under a self-imposed quarantine for ten days, we were in the ramparts of our cozy home whining about all the things we had to fix now that we were back—a potential termite issue, blinds that needed replacement in our son’s room, and a leaky faucet in the kitchen. Although the suitcases were emptied fifteen hours after we arrived, every room now held the debris of a long journey. I noticed how while returning home had folded us right back into the familiar, we tended to also experience a strange disconnectedness with it all, at least until all the jet lag and newness wore off.

Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam,

Be it ever so humble there's no place like home!

A charm from the skies seems to hallow us there,

Which, seek through the world, is ne'er met with elsewhere:

Home! Home! sweet, sweet Home!

There's no place like Home!

~~~ J. H. Payne, (1791-1852), Clari, The Maid of Milan

After more than half a year of life in a barebones serviced apartment in Singapore, returning home has been unnerving. The furnished apartment boasted one painting on the wall of the living room and one each on a wall of our two bedrooms. Our kitchen was a three-foot extension of the living room packing in also the fridge, a washer and a dryer. 

In contrast, in Saratoga, the kitchen dominated the house. Everything in the house radiated off this central spot. Now, however, the granite countertop of my large kitchen was jarring. It felt over the top. The cherry cabinets were too dark. I was also appalled by the number of things I had acquired over the years. The bathroom we  remodeled right before we left for Singapore now seemed glitzier than The Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles. Outside the bathroom I stood fumbling around for the switch to turn on the water heater the way I did in our apartment in Singapore. 

Despite the strangeness, everything at home was still just as it was. My husband confessed that he had a problem. Everything was too still, he said, as we lounged on the sofa in our living room and looked out onto the quiet of our driveway. “Just look! Not even a leaf is moving outside!” he cribbed. “Like everything seems dead.” I insisted, on the contrary, that the silence and tranquility were comforting. What looks dead to one person can seem peaceful to others. It’s little wonder that condolence messages are ironies in themselves—“Rest in Peace”—as if what was never attainable in life could ever be experienced in death.

This uncanny silence of suburban America cannot be found in Singapore. The sound of daily life on the roads traveled up to the 15th floor of our high-rise apartment even though gardens, trails and drains absorbed some of the ambient noise. Singapore is a diminutive nation; surprisingly, for such a small place, the sounds of city life were not intrusive. Nature intruded often, however, to embellish the audio-visual impact of daily life. On almost every other day, we witnessed the cacophony of thunder, lightning and rain. On many rain-drenched nights, we returned to our apartment building to the crescendo of toads.

I saw why my husband missed those sounds now in Saratoga. “Do you know I could never sleep after 7 AM in Singapore?” I said to him. The container trucks that barreled down Clementi Road to and from Jurong port area were so loud that I never got more than five hours of sleep on most nights, I said. My husband—who stirs when a bee belches—disagreed vehemently. “Well, I don’t agree, my sleep was never ever disturbed in Singapore,” he intoned. I knew I’d never win an argument in which  one person was blinded by his abiding affection for Singapore.

Our altercations reminded me of the exchanges between my parents when we returned to India from Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania in 1978. My mother and I had been wary of our move to East Africa. Yet after we returned home to Chennai, she and I missed our social life in Dar. I missed my high school classmates. My father, on the other hand, snapped right back into his new work life.

I wondered if humans, too, like the animals of the Serengeti, were meant to be nomads forever. What were we doing by marking our territory and building a life in the same place until we died? Our stay in Singapore as well as the eighteen months of life under the pandemic offered me some lessons about the nature of home. How could I take some of the “best practices” over from our life in Singapore to our life in Saratoga?

1.    Friends Both Young and Old: A variety of friendships kept us engaged with the world in Singapore. Some of our friends were in their late thirties. Another couple with children was younger still. But the Singaporean Chinese couple we befriended (after running into them on a trail) were in their 80s; the gentleman, JKH-Sir, writes me essays on WhatsApp when I share my posts with him. There’s nothing JKH-Sir does not know, nothing he does not have an opinion on and nothing he does not wish to not know in depth. When he invited us home, he opened several bottles of red wine and fished out bottles from his cellar, the price of which made me feel faint. He led us to his backyard to show us his night blooming ‘queen of the night’. A species of cactus that rarely blooms, it only does so at night, and its flowers wilt before dawn.  

People like JKH-Sir inspire me. They make me believe that life begins at eighty. I know we will be looking for people like him in the Bay Area.

2.    The History and Bounties of Home

As we headed to Changi airport on Monday, our Singaporean cabbie, Devan, told us how the pandemic had altered his thinking with respect to his country. Since he couldn’t leave Singapore, he had learned to appreciate all the local trails and the islands and had managed to explore the length and breath of his country every weekend. The pandemic had indeed taught us to appreciate the possibilities right inside our homes.

I saw what Devan meant. In much the same way, my approach to understanding California and the United States needed to shift, too. There was so much to see and do.

3.    Staying Global,  Savoring Local.

When I bit into an orange my friend dropped off today, I thought about all the tastes of home that made California so special for me. Few places in the world matched the quality—and variety—of California’s produce sold at farmer’s markets across the Silicon Valley. There were stories I wished to write about California’s unique blend of cultures that had fostered innovation in technology, arts and agriculture.

Four years ago in Kolkata, after I met the prolific writer and poet Nabaneeta Dev Sen,  I combed through the internet to listen to all her lectures. Something she said about making an effort to understand one’s heritage and identity resonated with me. I quote her: “You cannot be global without being rooted in your culture.”  

4.    The View From Home

From my office in Saratoga, I feel I write with more assurance. In Singapore, I missed the access to the reference library I’d built at home over two decades. I’ve missed pulling out a specific book from my shelves and sitting down to read a section for inspiration. There’s the nonfiction and fiction that I’ve collected—that one dollar Notes From Underground, the Vaclav Havel collection of plays I bought in Prague, the stack of E. L. Doctorow, and the many translations of Indian regional fiction, among many others that I’ve still not whipped through. Reading, both planned and unscheduled, gives me perspective. I’m aware also, as they often say in the world of journalism, that the juiciest stories are always available for the picking right in one’s own backyard. That will likely inform how I will overhaul these letters from Singapore now that I’m back in America.  

In this post-Singapore phase, my husband and I have reentered the life of quotidian cares and our on-again, off-again domestic strife. We are now closer, physically, to our children with respect to time zone even though they are 3000 miles away on the east coast. Adult children, however old they are, are not unlike house plants. They need some feeding and some pampering; they need an occasional nudging as well as a little talking to at the different stages in their lives. Last morning, I realized just how much they needed tending to when our son’s face bubbled up on FaceTime, right after he moved into his new Brooklyn pad.

“Mom!” he said, his Odyssean beard and Neptunian hair looming large on my iPhone. “My new place is so nice, look!” Like our Japanese maple, he too needed a good shearing. This was one of the reasons I most certainly needed to be back in California again.