Little box houses of blue, eggwhite, and brown arranged across well-built pavements that adorn the quaint neighborhood of North Berkeley. In one of those brown houses, I sprawl on my mattress this lazy Friday afternoon. Right outside, a bunch of kids are playing volleyball and their cheers and exclamations are these days the permanent backdrop to my solemnness—thoughts that often parallel them by jumping from elation of new adventures into the valley of immigrant despair all within a few minutes. In a month, life has become a tumbling shiny mess—a swirl of potential but nary an idea of what.
Exactly a month back, I remember partly sitting, partly lying on my minimalist bed in my apartment in Bangalore. Before I had moved in there, the room was occupied by the landlord's kids—I'm guessing girls. The walls were pink. The table that extends into a bookshelf was pinkish, although I did take down the stickers plastered all over them. Meanwhile, my white curtains opened to a window of bougainvilleas and the balcony proudly held the teacup stains I left there, giving way to the world outside—kids playing cricket on the street, the dilapidated single-story building that hosted my neighbors, a walkway in my society, and of course the creepers I found hard to let go of climbing back onto the balcony railings.
The possessions now sprawled beside me, along my white-walled, white-doored prim and proper apartment somehow belonged to those pink hues. Or perhaps they too are yet to completely accept that sunset is now at 9, not at 6, that the backdrop is now volleyball cheers coming from a well-built court, not the merriment of kids and cricket on unpaved streets, and that their collector is figuring out her life while dealing with tangible changes of a new life often accompanied by severe tan and several sunscreen experiments. As I try to find equivalents for a life lived in heartwarming chaos, I replace rotis with tortillas, chutney with marinara sauce, and the comfort of home with the promise of a world to be explored. And yet there are more that I cannot find equivalents for than the ones I could. So many more.