Children of a Lesser God

It is certainly romantic. Perhaps I would even call the world I have now occupied for the last week to be poetic. There is a freshness to the air I now breathe that DC lacked-both due to its humid summers and its cultural asphyxiation. The animals roam freely, intertwining nature into a more cohesive existence than what the greenery of Seattle offers. There is a healthy disdain of one another, a casual apathy that is surprisingly warming - as if to tangentially prove Dostoyevski’s claim: “the more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular.” 

Here I have arrived, rummaging through the streets of London. My worldview is now curated through a culture that is equidistant between cheerily familiar and grotesquely distant. The neighborhood where I am residing, the pristine and affluent Chelsea, has become a source of deep security, and thus, deep affliction. The serenity of routine lulls me into a false sense of entitlement. The crystal blue skies that have persisted since my arrival entice me to believe that any trouble in life is reserved for a prior life and sometimes worse, an “Other” life. I order a 30 dollar salad for lunch that I do not particularly enjoy; although my stomach is not content, my attention is called to the swelling in my throat, one that often arises in instances of heartache. These paved streets are shaky foundations as I enter the next chapter of my life.

I really cannot explain why I am here other than I can afford to be. No one’s livelihood is contingent on income, nor am I under the pressure of a timeline to be successful by tomorrow. I frequently remark that my time in the UK will be a “study abroad” year, implying both the privileges of familial financial security and internal self-confidence (sometimes egoism) in my journey. So with this, I begin to walk. And I walk to Hyde Park and feel overwhelmed by the beauty of every person who walks by-a beauty that is both genetically inherited and highly maintained. And I walk to Shoreditch and on my way there, pass by what presumably is a highly integrated Muslim and generally South Asian community. Out of fear of being unable to communicate, I refuse to acknowledge anyone, though any man or woman could have been my parents in another life. Or my uncles in this one. And then I walk to Buckingham Palace and I do not take any pictures nor do I even glance for more than a second at the building - I have assimilated. 

I am afflicted because this is a city that is not conducive towards those with “a dollar and a dream.” For better or for worse, there is a mythology in a place like New York, in Chicago, DC, or LA, that anyone who believes can achieve. It is the philosophical underpinnings of our films, the force that elevates our hip-hop stars to be cultural icons - in truth, it is the religion of the nation. And I witness a chasm between that mysticism and London. The strata is rigidly defined - bricks have been occupied by the same last name for centuries; the elites are segmented by their physical appearances and cultural backgrounds; and if you have not bought your way in already, you should never expect to. A dollar, absolutely. More than one. A dream, subsidiary. Relics of a bygone era.   

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Perhaps my difficulty to reconcile with London derives from its juxtaposition to the very existence I have cultivated thus far - in other words, the city looms large because it represents a monumental crossroads of my life. To thrive materially and socially in London is not an impossible task, far from it. Yet thriving where dreaming in epic proportions is confined to the naive and uninformed is an existence I am unfamiliar with. In fact, coursing through my veins is the blood of two dreamers.

On one hand was a woman who grew up in the slums of Calcutta, India. Her upbringing was situated within a makeshift home, always subject to the whims of fate and nature. She was uneducated, at least formally speaking. There was no expectation of clean water, let alone leaving abject poverty. But she grew up in a home which fed her love where food could not be and as long as it remained, so too did hope. Diametrically opposed to her was an upper-middle class man, picturesque in his frame and mannerisms. He was the son of an owner of a trucking company that did well for itself in India, particularly during those years. A muddled narrative ensues on how they actually meet -as a friend once told me, there are two sides to every story and then the truth- but what is certain is that there was a synergy between the two that would funnel into a sustained, requited love for each other. 

But that love was not reciprocated by the country. In an environment where a poor Bengali and a wealthy Punjabi should have never met to begin with, a love marriage between the two was at best, frowned upon and at worst, adamantly denied. Undergirding that was a tumultuous political climate that has been the inspiration for artists and activists alike, propelling the two to leave in search of a better life. Long gone was the security of the life before, both financially for my father and communal based love for my mother. 

And thus, I was born, into a small apartment outside of Seattle, WA. Five people crammed into a place, where the smell of spices began my mornings and ended my nights. Religious images infiltrated my earliest memories as a child; it was the only thing the family had seemingly held onto for guidance in this foreign land. And how I hated religion then - to thank a higher power for our daily bread when we were seemingly living on borrowed time struck me as a working definition of absurdity. My parents immigration status meant my father often spent weekdays away from home because a gas station in southern Washington was the only place that would take him in for work. Meanwhile, I saw my mother work three jobs to provide food on the table, clothes on my back and a little extra so that I would never catch the pity of a stranger. 

I assuredly will never want to return to the days we were on food stamps and I do not cherish the moments where I relied on free school lunches. I was never comfortable having to spend my nights during elementary school sleeping on a couch where my mother worked night shifts because she did not want to leave me in the house alone. Nor do I particularly appreciate an existence where the parents of my friends in middle school stopped asking if I needed anything and began to simply offer it as routine as they would their own children. 

Yet still, at the risk of romanticizing poverty, I will say there is an authentic beauty to it that I fear I gave up in a sort of Faustian bargain. It is as Camus said: “There is a solitude in poverty, but a solitude that gives everything back its value.” Seen from the very bottom of the well, the wholeness of the world can be grasped. One can see the sky entirely and all of the world beneath that. From this perspective, every single creature and thing lucidly resonates with your own breath and thoughts. All smiles mean more. All sunny days call for celebration. This is peace. More so, there is the feeling of endless possibilities because the sky itself seems so endless. In my lowest of moments, in the depths of poverty, I imagined myself to be among the sky as it shines and with the flowers as they grow. I could be anything precisely because I was nothing - like unmolded clay, I had no form, no customs, no rules. 

When I myself was consumed by anger, or melancholy, or longing (but never anguish, because affliction in poverty cannot exist where there is no vis-a-vis), I was able to transform myself into my favorite characters and believe I too had the power and status they did - in the span of weeks, I was Jimmy Conway and Jimmy Baldwin, Jake Gittes and Jay Z, Tracy McGrady and Orson Welles. Sanity through transformation. 

While I kept dreaming, so too did my parents. They sacrificed everything for their dream - to be financially successful enough so that I would never have to be concerned. And they accomplished that. They are the proud managers of old people homes in the Seattle area; they achieved the American dream and they still work as hard now as they did then. And I am thoroughly weaving between the worlds of asceticism and materialism. 

That aforementioned sky no longer feels the same when I look up. To look at it from the bottom means that everything is transparent. Everything is honest. Security and elevation, which I have gradually experienced over the course of the last four years, to the point in which I walk confidently in the well-aged Sloane Street, serves to diminish the possibilities. How rich the irony is when one feels insecure by security. Invariably, I am seeking to capture the purity and clarity of paradises lost. 

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I read recently that any country where one is not bored is a country where one cannot learn anything. For better or worse, I have found that to be true. If London has been anything, it has been a place where I have begun to learn about myself, and the world around me. I have little community to build off. There are no coffeeshops I can go to where my order is ready before I walk in the door nor is there much escapism in a world one has read so much on. Thus, I am stuck in a crevice with no hope for returning to the cooking of my sister or the comforts of my own bed. I am without distraction to stare at myself in the mirror and wrestle with these insecurities. I grow uncomfortable the more I stare because I am unsure if the reflection is sincere. I am anxious that I have lost my way. I am painfully aware of my shortcomings, both perceived and actual. And I am frightened of the journey ahead. 

And strangely, I am rapturous and confident. This process of reconciling made me honest and hence, restored my heart. In the ravine between myself and my thoughts emerges a desire to rediscover the world as I did in my earliest days of dreaming. Have you ever listened to Illmatic in the streets of Chelsea? I am what I was, only to walk in boots and not Nike trainers. The beauty of the world must be rediscovered or it is all futile. And so I must ingratiate myself. At the benches of the park, I create narratives for the young women who walk by and smile at me. They and I wrestle with the same ghosts. At the palaces of Queens and Kings, I create my own tales about how these grandiose buildings were built and what they held in their courts. Amidst the hustle and bustle of Sloane Square does an elderly homeless woman sit on the bench next to me, offering what little she has. And while I disregarded those in Shoreditch, I cannot do the same to her. And she tells me more about her life, and how she has a cousin who worked at Oxford. She tells me why I need to go to the Sikh temple. She tells me about the lovely Veteran’s Hospital. My heart is filled. She says she will say a prayer for me but I know I will need three - one for each life I have lived and a third to give me the strength to intertwine them. And I leave and pay 15 pounds for an Uber to a destination I can walk to and find myself harkening back to an old quote that proves to be particularly poignant today, in a land that has already taught me so much in a week: “Just as it took me a long time to realize my attachment and love for the world of poverty in which I spent my childhood, only now can I see the lesson of the sun and the land I was born in.” 

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I can only write this honest reflection of myself because of my friends Nick, Jerome and Malik; they have seen me - and forced me to - wrestle with this from the day I arrived in DC and have pushed me to always be honest about it. And they have listened every day, even when I exhaust them. And because of Donnie, who taught me what love and friendship are all about from my earliest days of adolescence.