Claiming the Earth

Several decades ago, during my first trip to Ladakh, long before Indian tourists “discovered” their own Shangri-la, I met a man perched on a boulder in the midst of the colourful bazaar. He didn’t fit into the boxes I had neatly organised in my head (this was long before I liberated myself from the boxes), so I asked him where he came from. “I am a citizen of the universe,” he said mockingly. I considered him with disdain and wondered if that was indeed the required dress code for someone who wished to inhabit a realm beyond time and space. Today, I may have moved several countries away, but a part of me rests in the Central Asian bazaar, high above it all, where the universe converged, so many decades ago.

I have left parts of myself in every space that I have inhabited, just as I have taken with me parts of the places where I have lived, travelled, explored, journeyed… but even after all these years, there isn’t one place to which I entirely belong.

I attribute this to my nomadic existence – first with my family, traversing the Gangetic plains and the high Himalayas before finally, dropping a few prop roots in the romantic metropolis of Calcutta (do I have to say Kolkata?) only to move to Delhi.

Like a migratory bird, I spent a quarter of a century in a city that was repeatedly built, rebuilt, plundered, settled, invaded, abandoned, resettled, forgotten, remapped, repopulated by kings, emperors, colonisers and founders of a new India. I kept returning to this city after my many jaunts. So I went to Chennai, where along with a smattering of Tamil and neighbours in Besant Nagar, I picked up a yen for hot, ghee soaked idlis with sambhar for breakfast.

I didn’t take to jollof rice as much as I took to the people in Nigeria who continue to stay in touch. Somewhere, in my mind’s eye, Sokoto state with its camel market and the Sultan’s palace remain exactly as they were when I left.

Although I kept returning to Afghanistan for several years after I left, Kabul is perhaps the only city that to me is dynamic and untainted with sepia. The only place that seems unchanged is the straight road to Jalalabad – cutting right through the Kabul valley, traversing several mountain passes before finding Jalalabad. It is the same road that takes you to Torkham, the boarder with Pakistan. With all my trips immunising countless kids entering Afghanistan, there is a part of me wandering Torkham, I am sure.

Other than my sojourn in the UK as a student and the annual backpacking trips I did to Europe where I mostly shacked up with friends while seeing different countries on the cheap, I did not really claim Europe as my own… until I met my husband. But this has been a process of acculturation more than assimilation as I went from being monolingual to embracing a new language. Not Dutch, but French. Language has opened a completely different window to my world and enabled me to understand Europe the way I understand India (almost). Being European also involves learning how to ski and I’m not sure I have mastered that – yet.

Through my husband I have acquired a fondness for the USA, the only country to have given me a culture shock when I first landed in Atlanta for a training with CDC in 2008. Strange that a melting pot so diverse should intimidate me thus, but I bravely went on to traverse the continent, reconnect with friends, find lost family, and even feel encouraged to bring our daughter to travel its immense expanse. The fact that she fits US states on her magnetic map with ease makes me realise that she, like her father, has claimed the continent.

I don’t necessarily go about planting my flag everywhere I go, but I do realise that some places have planted themselves in my heart and etched themselves permanently in my mind. The Himalayas, for example – as a child going to school in Darjeeling, I took to the mountains and nature and found endless entertainment in the lush Himalayan forests. I watched the flying foxes, the brightly coloured birds and butterflies which influenced my professional interest in the environment and sustainability. As a student, I started to trek actively and have clambered up the slopes in Ladakh, in Garhwal, Himachal, traversed glaciers in India and Nepal, and marvelled at the icy lakes in Bhutan. If I don’t return to these mountains at least once a year, I feel as uneasy as a migratory bird whose flight path has been diverted…

As it has been for many of us in the year of the pandemic. We find ourselves in a holding pattern, waiting in transit, to return to the places we have claimed. What has certainly changed for me, is the thought of experiencing the joy of returning to familiar haunts rather than exploring the new. Of reuniting with my scattered family and friends. Of checking in on old forest paths, mountains, and trees to see if they are OK.

Perhaps that is a good thing. And maybe, just maybe, the tide is turning.

Gitanjali

The writer, and the other stuff.

Hello. I’m Gitanjali — development practitioner, sometime author, full-time mother, and very part-time golfer. I’ve spent the last two decades working across South Asia, West Africa, and bits of the world in between, mostly on polio eradication, regional integration, global health, and gender.
This site is a collection of essays I started writing during the pandemic and never quite stopped. Some are field notes. Some are rants. Some are about the strange things you notice on a video call when you’re on your thousandth one. They are written from Switzerland, where I now live with my husband and our daughter.

Writing is how I figure out what I actually think. I publish in case any of it is useful — or, at minimum, mildly entertaining — to you.

If you’d like to get in touch, you can find me through the usual channels. Otherwise, thank you for reading.