Elsewhere

I often feigned illness on Monday mornings to avoid a needlework class in school. As soon as the school bus had trundled down the street, however, it was safe to be well again. I remember lying back in bed, looking out at a peepul tree, and dreaming my way into ancient Greece.

- Arundhathi Subramaniam

As a seven-year-old in Mumbai, I knew absolutely nothing about ancient Greece. But I did know that the seas would be bluer than any I'd seen. The skies would be more azure, the olive groves more mysterious. And the sound of Orpheus' lute wafting across goat tracks and forested valleys would be magical.

How did I know that? Because, like every other kid, I understood elsewhereness. No flight, train, or boat could ever take me there. And if they did, I knew I'd want to be right back here—on this bed, looking out at the same peepul tree. The crux of elsewhereness was that it was always—well, elsewhere. Once you got there, it was always someplace else. That’s what made it so special.

Years later, I wrote a poem that started with the line, “Give me a home that isn’t mine.” By then, I knew that what I wanted was a home that spelt familiarity and strangeness, anchorage and adventure, security and freedom. I wanted both. And, of course, that meant a life of perennial oscillation—between travel and return, exploration and withdrawal, advance and retreat. To be human, it seemed, was to swing between two seductive polarities.

Later, I found elsewhereness had its political uses. I found that an 18th-century writer like Jonathan Swift could speak of a place called Lilliput to make scathing references to the England he lived in. Elsewhereness was a way to tell veiled truths, knowing full well that the veil revealed more than it concealed.

A poet like Wordsworth could speak, I found, of pastoral landscapes to make an oblique statement about industrialisation and moral decline. A poet like Frost could speak of the dense forests of New England to make a statement about mechanisation and modernisation. It wasn't what they said. It was what they didn't say that made their critique devastating.