Lost Life [en]

IUCAA, 18 August 01, 0:30 pm

For the first time in my life, I find myself missing the life I had at some point. I have often felt unsatisfied by the present, but as far as I can remember I have always coped by looking ahead into the unforseeable future: “things will be better when…”

I really miss the life I had with Somak and Aleika in IUCAA. I miss it in the sense that I would really like to be able to go back to that time. I don’t have the feeling that I’m particularly unsatisfied with my present, though – I just wish I could still be living in the cosy little family we had.

Visiting them in Birmingham is a way of finding a bit of this life again, but much too briefly. Coming here is a way of looking straight into what hurts – a chance to realise where exactly the hurt is, maybe, and hopefully to help heal it.

Déchirure [en]

IUCAA, 17 Août 01, 0h30

Durant les deux derniers jours, j’ai croisé nombre de personnes qui faisaient partie de mon petit monde à  Pune. J’ai fait du shopping, j’ai exercé mes talents diplomatiques indiens avec les vendeurs de divers magasins, j’ai mangé dehors avec Madhav et revu ses copains étudiants, et parlé hindi avec Nisha.

J’avais bien des choses à  écrire, mais elles sont un peu dans l’arrière-plan, maintenant. Après un téléphone à  Aleika, me revoilà  toute nostalgique de l’époque ou nous vivions ici ensemble. La vie que nous avions me manque – et elle aussi, elle me manque. Je crois bien qu’il reste une déchirure qui n’a pas guéri. Quitter un lieu ou une personne trop vite et un peu en catastrophe, ça n’aide pas à  passer à  la phase suivante dans de bonnes conditions.

Et d’un coup, je me demande si d’une certaine façon, je n’ai pas passé une bonne partie de l’année passée à  payer mon départ brutal de Pune. Je crois que je n’étais pas prête à  rentrer – peut-être bien parce que mon départ initial de suisse ne s’était pas passé non plus le mieux qu’il aurait pu.

Il me reste un peu moins de dix jours pour parvenir à  quitter IUCAA en paix.

Pensée [en]

Mieux vaut faire face à  ce qui fait mal. Enterrer la souffrance sous le silence n’est qu’un pis-aller.

Daily Snippets [en]

IUCAA, 16 August 01

Time is starting to fly by. I found a nice Internet Café near Ambedkar Chowk, arranged travel to Delhi and planned a day or two in Bombay with Nisha and Shinde during the Ganesh festival.

I went on a shopping trip to MG Road with Madhav this afternoon. As my eyes are still full of Europe, the goods in Indian stores are all the more tempting.. Maybe I’ll have to start some import-export business so I can walk around buying everything that catches my eye without any guilt.

During the last couple of days I have bumped into a fair number of people I am aquainted to. Most of the security guards and IUCAA staff recognise me, and I saw Shobha, Varun, Tarun, Rita and a couple of people from the servant quarters. I went to visit “my” jeweller, and stopped by at the choli-maker’s.

She has been ill for the last couple of weeks – the flu, they say. Her two daughters are ill too. Her husband showed me upstairs into their small flat so that I could say hello to her. She looked really thin and unwell, something like half her normal self. It really hurt me to see her like that. I hope she gets better.

During a year here, I have acquired quite efficient indian interpersonal skills. If I compare my achievements over the last few days, dealing with shop-keepers and other people, to the way I got around (or rather, didn’t get around) when I first set foot in this country, it is rather satisfying.

Keyboard Stories [en]

To make things worse (as it always happens in this country…) they all seem to have standardized on a 101 key keyboard. Sounds like a lot of keys to hit, doesn’t it? Actually, it is short of one to keep me happy, especially when I mark up as I type. But now, before I let you know which is this magic missing key, I have to provide you with a little digression.

If you don’t know how to touchtype (or perform anything near it) and have never marked up HTML by hand, you might not understand all of what is coming. Don’t worry – it’s pretty futile stuff, though it might hopefully be funny for those who have shared similar experiences.

Have any of you touchtypers out there ever experienced the joy of finding yourself in a country which uses a keyboard layout different from yours? It’s absolutely maddening. It is back to square one, or worse. You just can’t type. Chances are that you will quickly figure out how to install your native keyboard – that is, providing you didn’t already know how to do it.

With a year spent in India, regular trips to the UK, and enough excursions into “raw DOS” (understand: with the factory default keyboard settings) on broken or misbehaving computers, I have gained a fair knowledge of the English (US and British) keyboard. The mapping isn’t that different from the French (swiss) one (which is, while I’m at it, radically different from the standard French AZERTY keyboard, which requires a “shift” key to access the numerals), although most of the punctuation keys are scattered about in wierd places.

The main problem with these English keyboards is that they don’t give access to all the pretty accented characters one uses in French. And having to type ´ and à all the time simply makes me want to scream (especially on a keyboard where I fumble a bit when it comes to “non-letters”). All this to say that if I need to type in French (other than chat and email, which can survive without the accents), the first thing I do when I sit at my “workplace” is install my beloved French (swiss) keyboard.

And now, as you have had the patience to follow me through this geek-talk, I will tell you which key disappears in the void when you install a 102 key French (swiss) keyboard on a machine which depends on 101 little plastic caps for your input. I warn you, however, that non-geeks may not fully appreciate the revelation. So be it.

The missing key is the one which enables to type “<” and “>”. (Note for non-geeks: these two characters are indispensable for writing any HTML tag – locate the “view source” command in your browser to see it with your own eyes.)

With this information in hand, you can imagine how much I miss my Cyberia, and how much I hope that I will find an adequate workplace in Rishikesh. All the more as my typing has trouble keeping up with my writing, which in turn has trouble keeping up with my life and thoughts. None of which really matters as my site is still unavailable.

Internet Cafés [en]

IUCAA, 15 August 01

Before going shopping today (a torture for a shopaholic like me who has a credit card but enough saris and indian stuff to last her a long time), I went down to FC Road to find an Internet Café where I could type down these notes in peace and communicate with the rest of the world.

Cyberia, the Internet Café in which I spent a great many hours during the initial phase of my first stay here, is no more. I recall that they were about to move when I left town. After a lot of hunting around, I tracked down the present office. The closed door which greeted me gave no indication that an Internet Café was still part of their business plan (if anything was left of it at all).

Having tested two Internet Cafés during the afternoon, I daresay that Cyberia is no small loss to me. The people were friendly, technically competent, and above all, each computer booth came with plenty of keyboard and elbow room. All the places I saw this afternoon – and I saw many which I did not enter – seem to have adopted the cramped-cubicle-with-keyboard-in-drawer system. For somebody like me who enjoys resting elbows on table for a comfortable typing position, it is a complete disaster. Add to that my persistent tendinitis, which pokes a sore head out whenever I am sloppy in handling the mouse or attacking the keyboard, and you’ll get an idea how uncomfortable I was.

Humanité [en]

IUCAA, 15 août 01, 22h30

Passant à  travers un groupe de mendiants dans mon rickshaw, j’ai compris en un éclair le sens qu’a ma lecture de Si c’est un homme alors que je suis en Inde. En apercevant une de ces jeunes femmes vêtues de haillons, un bébé au regard vide, s’il a un, jeté négligement sur l’épaule, j’ai réalisé que ce constat fait par Primo Levi sur la perte d’humanité dans les camps, j’avais eu l’occasion de le faire par moi-même, quoique d’une position bien extérieure, lors de mon séjour en Inde.

Il vient un moment où le sort des mendiants ne touche plus – surtout celui des enfants, et de ceux qui ne vendent rien – parce que leur lot les met tellement en marge de l’humanité qu’il n’est plus possible de s’identifier à  eux. Il vient aussi un moment où l’on accepte qu’en Inde un animal n’est qu’un animal, alors que dans notre occident privilégié ils jouissent d’un statut plus élevé que nombre d’hommes sur la planête – et cela même si la loi peine à  les voir autrement que comme des objets.

“Est-ce bien?”, “est-ce mal?” et “que vaut-il mieux?” sont les questions que je ne puis plus me poser pour l’instant.

Poétique [en]

Il y a du doute
Il y a du vide
Comme un grand trou
Derrière mon âme

Un recoin sombre
Où vit une ombre
A-t-elle une forme?
A-t-elle un nom?

L’ombre, le trou
Ne sont en fait
Que la nausée
Du temps qui passe

*

Il est rentré, pourtant.
La peur au ventre
Ne sachant trop bien quoi attendre
Il marche les lieux familiers
Un sourire l’éclaire mais ses beaux yeux s’embrument
Dans son coeur la chaleur
Mais aussi le grand froid
Le froid du souvenir qui a perdu son âme
Du lieu tant aimé maintenant déserté
Oui! car se sont bien les gens,
Les personnes les visages leurs souffles et leurs bras
Amis chers ou passants en l’absence desquels
La ville n’est plus qu’une pauvre coquille
Dans laquelle on voudrait retrouver la chaleur
De la vie vécue mais perdue à  jamais.

Lecture [en]

IUCAA, 14 août 01, 23h00

Je suis en train de lire Si c’est un homme de Primo Levi. Récit de camp de concentration, lecture difficile — peut-être à  cause d’une sensibilité fragilisée par ce voyage — durant laquelle j’ai dû quoi qu’il en soit à  plusieurs reprises poser le livre quelques minutes avant de pouvoir continuer mon chemin à  travers ces mots disant tant de souffrance et d’humiliation.

Le plus dur est ce constat de Primo Levi qui se dessine au fil des pages: ce n’est pas le meilleur qui survit au camp, ni le plus digne, ni le plus courageux. Le camp pervertit l’humanité, et pour y survivre, il faut intégrer cette perversion. Etre un bon travailleur de camp qui “fait ses heures” et “se contente de sa ration”, c’est se destiner à  finir plutôt tôt que tard sous forme d’un petit tas de cendres. Les valeurs morales de notre société ne peuvent plus s’appliquer, et c’est le règne de la dé-solidarité.

Primo Levi attribue les principales raisons de sa survie à  la chance et au hasard, et même si au fond je sais à  quel point le hasard joue dans nos vies, je ne peux me résoudre à  l’accepter. Je crois bien trop fort que nous sommes maîtres de nos destins, et que le cas échéant, une providence doit veiller sur nous. Le fait que la vie ou la mort dépende du hasard me révolte.

Mis à  part le fait qu’en tant que femme, j’aurais eu bien peu de chances de finir dans un camp de travail, je ne peux m’empêcher de me demander si donné les circonstances, j’aurais fait partie des élus ou des damnés. Et bien pire, je ne puis décider ce qui eût été préférable…

IUCAA News [en]

IUCAA, 14 August 01, 7:30 p.m.

As I was coming back from Ambedkar Chowk with Nisha, I saw Suvarna on the doorstep of her house. It’s a bit strange to visit the Shinde’s in “Suvarna’s house” and to see her in “theirs” – but actually no more stranger than being here without Aleika and her family, pets included.

So I dropped in for a chay at Suvarna’s, we had a little chat and she showed me her colour TV, her kitchen racks and her cooler.

It’s nice to be able to do some actual conversation with Nisha, now that my Hindi has improved enough to really allow it. We used to communicate in a mixture of her broken English and my non-less-broken Hindi . which was fun though, in some way.

She told me that Taramai’s mother/in/law died a couple of months ago. Though I had never seen her myself, I had heard about her from Aleika, who had told me about this shrivelled old lady who lived on a bed in the room at the back of Taramai’s house, and who looked a hundred years old. With her husband gone as well, Taramai is now the “queen of the house” (although also a widow, of course, which means a lot more in India than in the West), which Nisha says she is quite happy about. Now, there is nocertainty about this next piece of news, but she might even get a flat in the new appartment block they have started building just next to her basti.