There is a Lot in a Name

Meow.

For the past few days, I have been trying hard to remember exactly what did I have to say here. Which stories did I want to share with you when I hastily googled substack and clicked on sign up last week around this time?

I am prone to forgetting. Not that I want to, but I just do, that is unless I write it down. Depending on the day/hour/moment I console or taunt myself for it.

It’s okay, maybe the ideas that slip your mind are just passing by and will return when you are ready for it. Afterall, all that you lost are floating around you just beyond the reach of human senses, brushing against the air you breathe, planting a seedling of the lost idea in your dreams.

You very well know your brain is a hopping monkey, why didn’t you just write it down you moron!

Anyway, turns out, it was not confusion over what to write that was bothering me. A pesky little fucker in my head was hissing at me endlessly- seriously, what do you have to say that is worth reading?

In a lecture she gave to the students of a writing program, Zadie Smith says, “The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life”. As an adept sleepless-sleepwalker who constantly flees her body, Zadie terrified me. Hence here I am, four years later, trying to transcribe stories unspooling in my head and share them with you. (This is also a disclaimer. I am taking the liberty to write the way I speak or how voices speak in my head, so please limit any expectations of continuity/rationality in the letters to the minimum).

I am meandering.

Let me get to what I actually wanted to tell you.

There are no standalone stories, right? Imagine a patchwork quilt - every story you hear, you tell others, you tell yourself, every story you will ever conceive or forget even are stitched into it. (Basically you must understand that I cannot tell you about anything without telling you about hundred other things, cause it is all related, you see. Unless I explain everything, I cannot rest, so bear with me as I lay out details and jump through stories).

Story(ies) behind the name- Nowhere Home

First, a few important details.

Let us start with the nameless. You meet someone, they hold your hands through the drivel of teenage-ing and life-living. There is no label, just the comfort of falling knowing you have a cotton candy cushion to fall into. This is what Alice and Ravi shares in Koodevide, a Malayalam movie that came out in 1983.

And then the man who serenaded us into this and many other stories, who is invoked by hopeless romantics every time it rains. Padmarajan.

A boy, N, who held on to the former’s stories, who let his love seep into words, music and cinema. In a letter, he confesses his love for the tender wines of vulnerability that make up Padmarajan movies, and for the artist himself.

In his movie, Humans of Someone, Govind brought back that familiar tune, making hearts flutter a little.

And for me, it brought back a memory.

I am ten, maybe nine. It is a humid afternoon, and I am trying to tickle her neck. She swats away my advances. To distract me, my grandmother offers a story. My brother is five, and I am crawling in all fours, all of some months, inching my way to a year. He was guarding me as I napped on the floor. Out of nowhere, my brother wobble-sprinted into the kitchen where my grandmother was hunched over the sink, scrubbing greasy pan-bottom. “Paavathiiiiii”, he squealed as he ran to her. He drags her to the room, and points at me. The nap had changed me, I had woken up wanting to sit up, and I did. He couldn’t contain his excitement and folded into himself, as he does when overcome with joy even now. (That is how he is, my Kannan chetan).

“He was looking at you like you were some kind of magic-being, you know”, she told me, running her fingers through my hair. He took his time to start speaking, and when I was nearing one and he was nearing five, he was just finding his way around. Paavathi was new, so was the sprinting.

I still wrap Nowhere Home around me, and tell myself this story. I remind myself how Kannan chetan sounds when he calls me Paavathi. It continues to save me from wanting to die.

And one day I wrote to N. Told him about Kannan chetan and thanked him for the music, the words, his love for Padmarajan. He wrote back. I was twenty-two, depression had said hello and taken over my life then, making me want nothing else more than I wanted to die. A song here, few words there, a little nameless flower bloomed between us. A cotton candy cushion to fall back on.

Last week when I panic-pestered A for name suggestions for the newsletter, he asked to think of my favorite song. I don’t know of favorite, but I know that when a piece of music gives you so much, you build a home in it. That is what I had did. And that is what made sense.

Hence, Nowhere Home.

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