Porte de Choisy

“Bienvenue de chez moi!”

The tram doors open to a blustery Wednesday evening. My Malaysian friend has brought me to an Asian supermarket because she wants to taste her way across the distance to home and because I have very little money to eat. We are going to buy ramen and on the tram there, I stick my head in a novel while trying to calculate the maximum number of Indomie packets that will be affordable for two weeks. My friends crack jokes in the corner or scroll through Instagram, swaying from the poles in order not to fall.

Last night, I woke up at 4:34 with a scrabbling in my stomach. I gulped water and rolled over to sleep. The good thing about sleep is that you can will yourself into oblivion about anything real. I will not get eight hours again, ok. There is one frozen lasagne in my fridge and half a baguette in my bag today, ok. I have three pages of writing to finish tonight, ok. There are four tram stops to Chinatown now, ok. I study literature but life is also maths, ok. Maybe not Pythagorean theorems but the cashier counts out your change in French, ok. This ATM doesn’t tell you your balance in English, ok. Two flicks of mascara on your eyes so you cannot cry today, ok. 17 more days till home and your mother cooking for you again, ok.

Okay. Okay. Okay.

How many okays does it take to really feel ok?

I go quiet as we thread our way through apartment blocks and food vendors. I think my friends have become used to this but today, it’s not because I am feeling anxious or depressed, as I have nervously explained to them in past cases. I am watching my Malaysian friend practically bound across the concrete and zebra crossings and it makes me glad to see her find a sense of warmth, a semblance of her home in “the land of white people” as she calls it. For months, I have been reading her poems, unashamedly angry and desperately tender, as she writes about conversing with two old ladies near Porte de Choisy in her language, or eating with chopsticks, her everyday rebellion. I have seen her quietly write herself into a middle finger, aimed at the white boxes she’s had to tick all her life, again and again.

I have been ticking boxes too. Sometimes I become the box itself. A white box - grease-soaked cardboard flimsy -  of chilli chicken curry, made cheap with too much oil and too much haste, in a far-flung foreign country. For take-away, please. I walk ahead, looking up. The apartment blocks in Chinatown are off-white and look like stacked boxes. If I squint my eyes a little bit, they transform into a beige neighbourhood in an unimportant part of New Delhi. My stomach is scrabbling and I squint harder. So many boxes in the world, all I am doing is trying to make a home out of them.

On the tram, between calculating ramen purchases, my eye snagged on a few phrases from my novel, that come back to smart in my vision.

“That’s nothing! You’re just making yourself sad.”

“You’re just making yourself sad.”

That’s nothing!That’s nothing!That’s nothing!

Nowadays, if you feel something, it is nothing. It is fleeting, it will pass, it is temporary, it will not stay – therefore, it is nothing.

I too am fleeting in Paris. I will not stay. I have been fleeting in every country I have ever been in: the one I grew up in, the one I fell in love with, the one on my passport, the one where I was born. What am I, then?

That’s nothing!

If you theorize an emotion and put it in a box, it becomes something. If you put people of color’s feelings into an A4 academic document, they become something. If you tear down our historical temples and buildings, then come to marvel at our ‘exotic’ ruins discarded like wrappers, we become something – the Paris of the East, the Switzerland of India, the Venice of Asia or whatever else. After Van Gogh died, someone put his paintings in four-corner frames and only then they became something.
But weren’t they always beautiful on their own? Weren’t they?

That’s nothing!

Inside the Asian supermarket, called Tang Frère (I note the amalgamation of a Chinese and French word each, a space left purposefully in between, the latter word meaning ‘brother’), it is a labyrinth. Foreign symbols and labels surround me in flocks, stacks, boxes. I am overwhelmed. My Malaysian friend is skipping across the aisles, picking things out for herself. I shuffle through the foreign sea, trying to find the ramen. I wonder if there is a place like this for Indians, or South Asians at the very least, somewhere in Paris. I berate myself for not having made the effort to find it all this time. In my head, the symbols around me transform into familiarity – Haldiram’s snack packets, Kurkure, Dabur remedies, okra, rows and rows of Maggi noodles (the mildest flavor hot), Amul dairy, Britannia biscuits, chai, Everest masalas, even paan and somewhere wedged in between, incense sticks. My eyes close. For a moment, I think I might slide to the floor, so quick that nobody would see, a smooth, boneless fall through into the ocean.

That’s nothing!

My eyes shutter open.
I must be too hungry; this is no way to think.

That’s nothing!

Our plastic bags are full and the walk back is desperate. Bead by bead, restaurant after restaurant, follow on a string. What a beautiful necklace! My Malaysian friend seems happy.

That’s nothing!

Homesickness is something experienced by many but always felt so firmly as an individual, so very on your own: alone. It’s like birth or death. There is no one else in the world who can understand what my mother’s biryani symbolizes, walking through a street near Porte de Choisy. But I know, everyone has their own assortment of eggs in their basket, their own collection of pains they can turn over and polish, shamelessly consume, hopefully neglect,.

“Every step, there is a new kind of smell hitting you,” my Malaysian friend exclaims as we walk. She is right. Everything smells foreign, fresh, delicious, and my stomach is scrabbling, my innards like scorpions on sand. Through the windows, men and women lift heaving chopsticks to their lips; through the windows, people carry on and carry on and carry on, inside the apartment blocks, inside a box. I look around me before we near the tram, squinting. The thing is, even here, where another people try so beautifully, so naturally, to assert themselves in this city, all I can see is another place where I don’t belong. Again.

That’s nothing!

That’s nothing!

That’s nothing!

The tram approaches and we step inside. Here is another box, where we don’t look at each other, until, of course, we are home.

***This article is part of a larger, work-in-progress that will be published in a later issue.

Painting by Brendan O'Connell