Verse

Verse I have my father’s name, but I am partly made up of my mother As I housed inside her, we bonded, latched on together by the inseparable connection of blood and bone. I am built out of friends that I have hugged and enemies I have tried to forget I consist of places I have been to and those that I long to visit My composition is every experience I have ever had – good or bad I am not complete without all of these, but I am enough!

Every time somebody asks me about my doctoral degree, I inadvertently tell them that 2020 was not a great year to start anything new, let alone moving to another country. It seems obvious to me now why one would say that. But in November of 2019, when I was finally deciding to do my PhD in Canada and jumping with joy at the news of securing admission, I did not know what awaited me. People say, “I had a long journey!” and it generally means that they travelled thousands of miles or long hours to reach their destination. For me when I finally landed in Canada in August of 2021, the term ‘long journey’ meant something totally different. It felt like light-years had passed as I traversed the tricky parts of travel during the pandemic. So, yes, like I was saying, unaware of what was to come, I decided to move to pursue higher education at the University of Victoria in British Columbia in January of 2020. I was excited at the prospect of moving from India to Canada and living in a country `in the West.’

I had one of those childhoods where I lived in my head a lot! Hardly aware of the world at any given moment and yet too conscious of it. My siblings till date relate stories at the family dinner table that I do not recollect. Mind you, I am there in the story, just that I cannot recollect witnessing the events in them. It’s a running joke in my family about me, that I seem to have both accepted, and been thinking about a lot lately. Where was I? What was I doing when things were happening around me? What was I thinking? But of the few things I can recollect from my childhood, I remember wanting to travel to different parts of the world, living independently and walking snow-covered streets during Christmas. Yes, I wear romanticised Hollywood Christmas glasses, if there is such a thing. For me, moving to the West meant I could create a life I wanted, have everything I imagined and be filled with joy. Did I tell you that I was 10 years old then, and clearly hadn’t met `life’ yet?

Even though much of my life happened in the 20+ years that followed, my dream of living in the West did not fade away. At 18, I moved to Malaysia for my undergraduate degree. It was the most exciting 4 years of my life, filled with independence, making friends from across the globe, and discovering myself. However, it was still not the West, and that experience did not completely match the images that had been planted in my head, especially by all those movies! It was close but not the same! As I moved back home after my education, I lived in the big cities of India, like Bangalore, Mumbai, and Pune, and continued my journey through life. I learned to maneuver the scary streets at night, budget my money, and fall in love, and then out of it, too. All these experiences I value dearly as they taught me so many lessons about life! However, the quest for snowy nights continued to haunt me, growing even stronger when a close friend moved to the UK for her degree. That served as a reminder that if I wanted to move, there was no point in waiting. That inner voice egged me on, that the time was now. Certainly, I questioned myself later when the world came to a standstill.

It was March of 2020, and India shut down! With a two-day notice to gather all the food and goods you could; we were told to lock up our doors to friends and family. Those of us who could afford it, hoarded the grocery stores and stocked up on products we needed, and also those we would never actually use. We were among the privileged few who had bulk orders placed online and awaited their arrival while scrolling on our gadgets to track the progress of our next orders. People lost their livelihoods, migrant workers in metro centres having no choice but to make a mass exodus overnight, to return back to their villages as our cities that needed them till yesterday, for construction and other manual labour, no longer had any use for them. In the comfort of our isolation, we witnessed people travel 1000s of kilometers in trucks, overflowing buses, hitchhiking, and families even walking long distances on foot. People were displaced from the cities they had just recently started to call home, and in many cases, abandoned by the same people they served. As the government was busy marketing the effective management of the situation, it forgot all about the economically marginalised, migrant, homeless, and youth population groups. These people with uncertain earning options were losing jobs as prices of necessities skyrocketed. The images flashed on our electronic devices everyday.

I must admit that these images made me momentarily grateful about my situation throughout my struggle to move to Canada. I was constantly reminded of my transitory state when friends and family inquired about my travel plans, these questions sneaking their way into my already exhausted brain. I used to haunt the walls of Facebook and YouTube reading and watching peoples’ stories of being stuck and finally making it to the other side. Thousands and even more across the globe. That, too, offered some solace, albeit temporarily!Verse

Verse Suitcases are usually known for holding things in them, but they keep things out too. Things we decide are not worth carrying around As we lug our baggage through life, we decide to keep some stories in our suitcases and others we leave behind.

I still remember the day my parents bought me a suitcase set as a gift for my accomplishment of securing admission to Canada. It was a sturdy 3-piece set, black in colour. As it arrived at my doorstep, I ripped open the cardboard and the plastic. As I sat on the floor, popping the bubble wrap that it came wrapped in, I suddenly became aware of how real this whole thing was. As much as I was looking forward to moving, I knew it would be hard to transition to a totally new country where I would hardly know anybody. During the pandemic, as I spent a lot of time at home, I built back some of those bonds that had rusted with distance. My parents live abroad, and I used to visit them once a year when they came to India. All this changed in 2020! We were in close proximity: parents, siblings, and our extended families too. I knew I was going to miss them! We figured out ways to reconnect with each other by cooking and eating together, watching movies, and also taking our ‘me’ time locked behind the closed doors of our respective rooms, when we had enough of each other.

As the world was grappling with the uncertainty of figuring out what the future would look like, in September, 2020, I started my online classes with an over a 12-hour time difference. We were introduced to the infamous Zoom meetings that soon became our lifelines. I met my peers through the rectangular black boxes of zoom; all 12 of us crammed up in the gallery view. With our living rooms blurred in the background, I vividly recollect my first 4 am class where the instructor asked us to introduce ourselves. Iran, India, Azerbaijan, Canada and Brazil, our virtual classroom was buzzing with stories from such diverse contexts. After months of classes, meetings, and teaching assistantships, I found myself living at once in two worlds. The other one started as I shut down my laptop in the middle of the night and picked it up again as I prepared myself for the ‘after 10 pm’ work schedule. As exciting as it was to live simultaneously in these two parallel worlds, a feeling of being in a constant state of transition became my way of life, taking up space in the empty pockets of my mind and time.

After a long tiresome process of filling long forms and standing in endless hospital lines to get my medical tests done while every innocent cough was treated with suspicion, in January 2021, I finally received my visa. As we grappled with what the future would look like, I took a leap of faith and decided to book my flight. I remember my hands shaking at the keyboard of my laptop as I looked up tickets. It was a mix of excitement and wrecked nerves as I imagined getting on a long-haul flight boxed up mid-air for 15 hours. However, for somebody who fears flying, the longest flight of my life would be the easiest part of my journey, and it was only after months that this realization dawned upon me.

I booked my first flight to Vancouver for April 2021. It was in February of the continuing unpredictable year that I got an email from Air Canada telling me that my flight was rescheduled to May as Canada had red-listed India, based on the rise in COVID cases. It was unexpected and threw me off, but I told myself, “Oh! It’s just another month”. This went on for a while, because on random days, I got unexpected emails from the flight wizards about my reschedules. I had sleepless nights, full of nightmares, about not making it to Canada, losing friends because they were tired of my reschedules, and of never fitting in because I was too late. Did I tell you that I am an overthinker and create a web of anxious thoughts that make me forget where I am in time and space? I had my flight rescheduled 5 times until they finally cancelled it, taking away any hope that may have lingered deep inside, of ever making it to Canada, my destination.

During all this time, I was hooked to stories of people who were getting similar emails, and some fake news about what the future would hold for travelers like us. Many were stories about Indian students across the country stuck in difficult situations, and not knowing how to get through it all. Among the morbid images of funeral pyres burning in bulk and dead bodies washed up to the shores of the holy Ganges, all this gloom highlighted by international media outlets (often unsuccessfully denied by their Indian counterparts), we were making sense of our surging sorrows stemming from the unknown.

The only option left for me to get to Canada was via a third country, and there, too, my choices were minimal – Mexico, Egypt, Ethiopia, or Qatar. Apparently, our COVID testing and the vaccine did not stand the test of authenticity and due diligence for the world around us. I fluctuated between twin emotions, of anger towards the world, and frustration towards my own homeland. At this moment, I must admit though, that perhaps I was just angry at myself for reasons unknown. As new countries continued to be added to that list, and some existing ones started red-listing India, I knew that I had to overcome my fear of travelling to an unknown in-between place and just take the plunge. And it finally happened! I saw that the list had a country that I always wanted to travel to. A holiday in disguise? Perhaps, it was a sign from the universe.

I have seen sunny photos of the Maldives on pages titled, “Places you have to visit before you die”, and other such attractive pitches to tourists that assume that the only thing standing between beautiful places and people wanting to travel to them is their determination to do so. However, with all my limited options of getting to Canada, Maldives appeared to be the one that felt like the relaxing vacation my tired body and restless mind so needed. I took a leap of faith and booked my flights and the hotel. As heartbreaking as it was to leave home and loved ones back behind, I knew the time had come. And that I had to do this for myself, and for that little girl who was still craving for her ongoing dream. A dream that was almost starting to fade in the dimming lights of a pandemic world. But as I swam in the vast ocean in the picturesque Maldives, some larger meaning of life was slowly starting to unfold.

Travelling during COVID takes away the joy of reaching the destination, I can assure you that. Queues get longer, people panic more, documents get heavier and under the mask of it all, trying to breathe yourself into relaxation does not help. However, you must believe me when I say that the universe was gently nudging me towards my destination. Processes were smoother, and although life events were creating large hurricanes in my brain, things suddenly didn’t seem so tough. People right in front of me were pulled out of lines for missing a single entry in the numerous self-declaration forms that had to be filled. And I just walked past! Mistakes were miraculously corrected, and I felt a force of life energy telling me that all I had to do was overcome my fear.

A photograph of a group of trees on snowy ground. There are footprints and tire tracks on the ground.

Photo Credit: Nabila Kazmi

Canada greeted me with wide open arms. Friends were waiting in anticipation at airports; others were leaving beautiful notes on kitchen counters with breakfast. It felt peaceful to not be in constant moving mode anymore. As the endorphins started to fade off, a quiet awareness dawned inside me that life is ultimately about sudden surges of highs and deep troughs of lows that either pass on like the tide or linger longer than we would like them to. But it’s mostly not-so-straight a line on a graph that is all about being in a constant state of receiving and living life as it comes to us. I am in that state right now!

Migration is tough! It is tougher when the world is scared to even move an inch. But I can see the snow outside my window, and, on some days, I must remind myself why I decided to do this.

Verse

Verse I read somewhere that migratory birds are protected And they very well should be! It's tough to leave your home and build another from scratch somewhere else, to find food and allies in new places. Ask me, I can tell you all about it.