The Shooting Star: A Girl, Her Backpack and the World

by Shivya Nath

When we returned home in the wee hours of the morning, I felt like we were both different people. He, perhaps because he had witnessed the magic of a meteor shower for the first time in his life. And me, perhaps because my faith that the world—and especially India—is still full of good, kind, honest and trustable people had become rock solid. Even if I had gone armed with an electric taser and an emergency escape plan.

when I hit the stiff bed in my kooba, this very fear of strangers that I had grown up knowing had compelled my twenty-something female self to go it alone and discover otherwise. Unbeknownst to me, it had become my mission to prove that the world isn’t the horrible place we often make it out to be. That just because there are some dirty fish, it doesn’t mean the entire ocean is dirty and we need to confine ourselves to the shores we know.

If I were to guess his age based on the amount of white hair on his head, I’d peg it at mid-sixties. Hearing his words, I’m bewildered.

The week was turning out just like we had wanted. We rode our bicycles along lush vineyards, stopping to taste wine and chat with the often quirky owners of local wineries. We stopped by at wine festivals and farmers’ markets, indulged in relaxed boozy brunches, visited a colony of the world’s smallest penguins on Granite Island and saw majestic sunsets over the vineyards.

A pang of guilt surges through me as she speaks. I could only describe my days in South Australia as delightful. On the other hand, I have trouble imagining my hosts transported from the tranquillity of their home to the mind-boggling chaos of India. What could my country have offered them? Turns out, a lot more than I could have ever imagined.

For four years, from 1942 to 1946, over 600 Polish children lived in the obscure town of Balachadi in Jamnagar, under the protection of Jam Saheb, at a time when the rest of the world had closed its doors to them.

She laments though that the ‘Polish children’ are now well into their old age and when they pass away, so will this incredible story of kindness in a foreign land that lives within them.

I picture again and again, young Karol in cold Siberia, walking through the deserts of Turkmenistan, riding on trucks through hot and dusty Persia, arriving on the western coast of India. I think of the joy an eight-year-old boy must have felt in finding shelter, food and acceptance, regardless of his ethnicity, after two years on the move. I imagine him, thousands of miles from home, in a strange land, among strange people, hearing a strange language, yet feeling at home because the kindness of strangers trumps all other strangeness . . . a feeling that has, in a very different way, comforted me on my own travels.

I read with a hungry curiosity what is sparsely written online about the ‘Poles in India’, as the 600 Polish kids came to be called. I dwell, rather patriotically, on the enigma that is India. There are many things we haven’t done right as a country, but in one magnanimous act of kindness, at a time when the rest of the world was on a killing spree, ‘Hindustan’ quietly gave 600 innocent children shelter and a second chance at life.

I chased the dark clouds to the outskirts of Desert National Park, closed for the mating season of the Great Indian Bustard, a rare bird of the Indian subcontinent. In our four-wheel drive, someone started a discussion about how this endangered species was overtaken by the peacock in the run for India’s national bird because of the expletive its last name could be mistaken for!

The rare monsoon rains in the desert, now no longer the scorched infinity, made me contemplate the transient nature of life. That’s when I first felt a tinge of melancholy.

Much like the rain-fed oases in the Thar Desert, the person I was now would disappear one day, never to be found again. The relationships I felt attached to, the things I dearly owned, even that strange melancholic feeling would be gone, never to be found again. I rummaged through my memories, looking for the person I had been on other rooftops.

And what did it matter? I might be the same flesh, but I wasn’t her. I was merely flowing with time, sometimes as strikingly as rain in a barren desert, sometimes as fleetingly as a shooting star in the night sky. And so was everyone I knew and everything I owned. I felt strangely liberated from the need to hold on to them, for I felt like I was merely holding on to an illusion.

Moving in with your parents? she asked with an air of finality. No. I’m just going to travel for a while, I said, not wanting to explain. But you still need a home. Why? Umm, everyone needs a home. To keep your things, to come back to at the end of your holiday.

I dreamt of a life without the baggage of my possessions, without the confinement of one single roof, without the roots that kept me trapped in one place. I dreamt of a little more adventure.

The spaces between us, geographically vast though they often were, spoke to us of the futility of legally binding our relationship when it felt free as the wind and intense as the moonlight.

Never before had I walked out of a door, or out of a city, with such an intense desire to live in the future that was already beginning to unfold. And never before had I felt so grateful for the person who stood by my side.

The sea waves had left us fatigued and it seemed to me that only a meal made with Sarsu akka’s aged hands and motherly love could satiate us.

Without being bogged down by things that were a constant in our previous lives—monthly rent, power cuts, grocery shopping, house repairs, traffic, social engagements, retail therapy—I had started to feel as though I was floating through life; treading lightly, thinking freely.

For a month, or as long as our feet didn’t get too itchy, we decided to live in a place rather than merely pass through it—get to know our neighbours, indulge in the local cuisine, discover our own hiking and cycling paths, understand the whims that baffle outsiders and yet have days to while away and work.

Unable to rent a car due to complicated rules for the Indian passport, we hitch-hiked across countryside villages with locals, in their ancient cars, trucks, even tractors. Though the norm is to leave them some gas money for the ride, they mostly refused ours, always saying, cu plăcere, with pleasure.

palinka

We dabbled in a little bit of everything: the basics of organic farming, sustainable food practices, simple living, vegan meals, debates on clean energy and film screenings on world issues.

No longer a fleeting crush on a gorgeous place, travelling became an attempt to forge deeper relationships—with a place, its people and its food—and make ourselves at home anywhere in the world, irrespective of our upbringing, colour, language and aspirations.

Confident that I no longer needed a life vest to float in the waters I had plunged into, my partner decided to get a master’s degree and then work full-time again. The spaces between us grew geographically vast again, but we continued to wash up on common shores, shunning the need to be legally bound to each other. After the initial ache of separation wore away, my journey felt lighter, for I knew I wasn’t carrying all of myself along.

The spaces between us taught me that I didn’t need to cling to my relationships. The ones that were strong enough would sustain themselves through distance and time; the ones that weren’t were not worth clinging to anyway.

In every place around the world I since called home, I fascinatedly observed the things that adorned the walls and filled the shelves, the shoes that lined the doorways and the pile of clothes that made it to the washing. And I couldn’t help but wonder whether we humans own things or our things own us.

As I write this, it’s been over four years since I’ve had a ‘home’ to go back to. I now comfortably carry twenty kilograms (fourteen in my convertible rucksack and six in my backpack) as the sum total of my possessions.

And when I live in homes with adorned walls and filled shelves and a big collection of shoes and big piles of laundry, I imagine, perhaps quite wickedly, how their owners would feel if, one day, they woke up with nothing. No things to dust, no things to fix, no things to rearrange, no things to look reassuringly at, no things to remind them of the days gone by, no things to be proud of, no things to fret about. Would they feel reassured, too, that their things don’t own them?

The further I continued on the path that seldom intersected with the paths of those I knew, the more I felt like a misfit. Why, in my late twenties, did I feel so vehemently against the idea of a marriage contract, determined not to bear children on an overpopulated earth and unwilling to conform to the conventional ideas of stability and home?

Like with many great dilemmas in life, I found conviction in the road.

The sky is the only roof we need, a Bedouin man told me proudly as we found our way to an off-the-grid ecolodge run by the semi-nomadic community. That’s when I first felt a tinge of joy.

Then materialistic attachments, along with the illusion of stability and ownership, pinned our kind down to one place. Unable to move freely under the weight, we learnt to grow roots—something that the Bedouins who slept peacefully in their makeshift tents on that silent night hadn’t yet learnt.

Over countless cups of sweet black tea—which people often jokingly refer to as Bedouin whiskey for its malt brown colour and indulgent sugar content—we heard about the norms of social life in this remote outpost. Guests can show up without prior notice, even in the middle of the night, but must cough outside the tent before being invited in so as not to invade the hosts’ privacy; anyone is welcome to stay with a Bedouin host family for three days without being asked the intention of their visit.

When I felt like a misfit again, I looked closer home for conviction—in the nomadic ways of the Fakirani Jat people in the Kutch region of Gujarat and the lowland Desia folk of southern Odisha. Some are nomadic by choice, some by circumstance; irrespective, their lack of possessions and roots gave me conviction.

I am not one of them. Their hardships, challenges and dilemmas are far different from mine. To say that I am one of them—raised in the comfort of an urban family, with a chance to study abroad, who impulsively decided to give up a permanent roof above her head and can seek them out for conviction—will be a lie. While they chase water and food, I take these for granted. While they remain mostly oblivious to technology, I lead a digitally charged life that allows me to earn a living wherever I am.

But I can say that I am the same flesh as them; the same blood flows through my veins. Perhaps the essence of what we seek is also the same. I can say, with conviction, that I am a descendant of someone who once moved with all her possessions, without a permanent roof above her head. I am a nomad.

As I watched Junior row away and the rain resumed, blurring my vision of him, I recalled the evening I had arrived, anxious and distrustful.

Their broad smiles and is-be-shkena greeting had eased my anxiety, but as the boys loaded my backpack and rucksack on the canoe and helped me climb on board, my apprehension had grown. Dusk was fast approaching, and I had little time to inspect the decrepit wooden canoe or consider turning back.

We manoeuvred rapids upriver with an old motor and a wooden stick, slowing down to a crawl at narrow bends, tilting almost sixty degrees when sharp rocks appeared on the riverbed. The dense forest on either side added a sense of foreboding to the ride, creating the impression that we could well be heading towards the end of the world. Adrenaline began to rush through my veins as I swayed from side to side with the tilting boat. The icy spray of the river on my face washed off the nervousness of being somewhere so remote, by myself, in a country I had set foot in only two days ago.

I could sense my rapid heartbeat and felt too edgy to have a conversation in Spanish, so we just walked on in silence. Until I strayed off the path, slipped on the muck and landed on my bum. Our laughter echoed through the forest, and sitting on my bum, peeping at the crescent moon through the canopy above, I felt like the curved moon was smiling down at us too. And thus I arrived in the home of a Bribri family—one of the last remaining indigenous communities in Costa Rica. Deep in the rainforest, without electricity or connectivity, far from civilization as I knew it.

I quickly scanned him—medium height, strong built, tanned to a chocolate brown presumably due to the strong sun, a machete tucked snugly into his waist belt, bearing a serious demeanour—and offered my muddy hand to shake, expecting to be shown my room so I could wash away the muck on my bum and bags. Instead, in a husky voice, he asked, quieres chocolate? Do you want chocolate?

If I was unlucky, like the three times I had entered neighbouring Nicaragua, I would be interrogated by a visa officer who couldn’t comprehend why someone from India would just want to ‘travel’ in Central America.

But as I readied my navy blue passport to be inspected this time, Junior looked amused and asked me to swap it for a swimsuit. Donning the strange combination of knee-length gum boots and my swimsuit, I followed him through a different stretch of the rainforest to reach the shore and hopped on to a wooden non-motored canoe with more trust than I had shown the first time. There were no rapids to be manoeuvred, no sharp rocks to be dodged; with a handful of swift motions of a wooden stick, we had crossed the breath of Yorkin River—to Panama! My favourite border crossing yet.

In his white vest, with his muscular body and broad white smile, under the gushing waterfall, he was to me the image of uncorrupted happiness, the kind that only nature at its purest and wildest can paint.

Halfway there, in the middle of the river, I realized that the current was pushing me downstream. I was becoming more tired with each stroke, but instead of panicking in my struggle, I felt amused thinking that if I drowned, I’d have drowned in no man’s land! That would be a cool story.

Pura vida!