rashmi-vasudeva.com

I hated that game, 'pass the buck'. I used to quake in fear awaiting my turn, the few times I played it when I was a teen. That painful shyness had the power to still tingle over me while I gazed at a FB photo my aunt uploaded of us playing the game in 1991. All I wanted to do was to become invisible. Or go home. I never dreamt then that in 2010, I would be finally and fully convinced that I come of a gypsy stock; that my heart is bohemian; that home is nowhere. Or everywhere.

This year I have seen plump suns, reds, crimsons and inky blues without having to move out of my room in Amsterdam.
I have walked beside a canal frozen stiff, on a road three feet wide with only a treacle-thick fog for company.
I have sat on a plateau on a hill in Geneva and looked long at an yellow weed unnerved and proud amidst the stupendous green.
I have known what it means to walk out of a metro station and find the 2000-year-old Colosseum at its footstep.
I have seen Venice but better still I saw Monet's Venice in Cardiff that is more Venice than Venice could ever be. Light is indeed like water.
I have stood in an abandoned graveyard in Bordeaux and plucked the most beautiful wild pink flowers all the while gurgling with happiness. The sky was blue.
I have also stood in a bathroom of a concentration camp. No comprehension was possible. The sky was still blue though.
And I have gone back to Brydges Place to stare and sigh about that little piece of heart that London has stolen from me.

This year has extravagantly displayed to me the charms of impermanence. It has taught me much about the notion of home, which can be an open road thick with snow with only my flat- footed marks or it can be watching 'The Musik' with a reluctant Siddharth, sitting cross-legged on our blue faux-divan. I know that far from having no home at all, I have many. And they are all neatly sectioned, filed and indexed within me.

The journey is endless. It is also beginning-less. I know now that we create imaginary places that we call our own. To feel at home is to look up and down an empty road and not get daunted; to feel at home is to skype endlessly with a dear friend from another continent and realise that its our faith, our loves and our passions that bind us and nothing else can ever; it is to carry snapshots of classrooms, streets, faces, laughter and memories of swinging chandeliers with you wherever you go; it is to shed tears because of having stumbled across music that clutches at your soul; it is to determine deep inside not to anchor anywhere no matter how beautiful the island.

At the end of this hyperbolic year that took me physically to 13 or more cities of the world and spiritually to the sneakiest corners of my mind and made me dust them, I am on unsure footing. And liberatingly enough, that is damn exciting.

I don't know where I will go from here. I do know I want to shout that out with a kind of glowy happiness that cannot be fathomed. I don't know what's in store but I do know I have a "small back-room" in my mind where I can fully be myself. (Thanks, Simpson.) 

I do know there are paths before me, all beckoning but I also know that none of them are neatly laid out.

At long last, it feels providential. I never had a chance to work out what I wanted to do with my life. Now, I have. I hear the cadence of the world, the rhythm of life. I soak it in when Tina Sani sings 'zindagi ki leh ussi ke dam sey hein' I can pause and rewind without fear. I am empty and I am filled up to the brim. I am at the beginning.