SOCIALLY AWKWARD

NAPOWRIMO DAY 4 PROMPT:

Poetry often takes us to strange places – to feelings and actions that are hard to express except through the medium of a poem. To the “liminal,” in other words – a place or sensation that exists at or on both sides of a boundary or threshold, neither one thing or the other, but something betwixt and between.

In honor of the always-becoming nature of poetry, I challenge you today to select a photograph from the perpetually disconcerting @SpaceLiminalBot, and write a poem inspired by one of these odd, in-transition spaces.

Picture of Essen Hauptbahnhof or Essen main station by Liminal Spaces (@SpaceLiminalBot) on Twitter. It is a railway station in the city of Essen in western Germany.

At the sixth entrance to Rajiv Chowk 
local hub for multiple metro lines 
(just like the Essen Hauptbahnhof)
I wait for my friends to catch up/
Nunchileul boda, to not seem rude. 
Air rushes into the long passage, strangely specific
the way it does in subways all the way up 
to the line at the buzzing detectors
growing longer. Beckoning my departure, 
reminder of the two-hour journey 
back across the state-line. 
Elegy of hostel curfew and anxious time crunch. 

One friend picks up the piece of paper he lodged in 
a subtle fold in the wall the last time 
another lags behind checking his pockets
for the elusive travel card. I wonder 
when traveling between two cities 
in two different states became easy. 
The long commute (now) not even that long,
the journey existing in the liminal moments 
of two different lives. Present and past. 
The simultaneously defeated decision 
of departure and the relief of return.

I see colors instead of voices leaving the station.
Most of them seem thick and blurry
people in a haphazard hurry to move -
although my nunchi has failed me 
at worse times. I think 
my friends are eager
they move to hug me and I 
stretch out my hand at the same time
always nunchiga eobsda 
             always socially awkward.
They say goodbye 
and my vision explodes in blue.
They say let’s meet again soon 
and all I see is white. It is time.

1. To watch nunchi (눈치를 보다/ Nuchileul boda):
   Watching nunchi is usually necessary when you are surrounded by many people at various gatherings like company dinners or meetings. Watching nunchi means being aware of your surroundings when you act in this setting so you don’t accidentally offend anyone. You watch nunchi when you pay attention to what you say and how you say it, when you observe the correct dinner etiquette, and when you find the opportune moment to leave without seeming rude.
2.  To have or not have nunchi (눈치가 있다/없다/ nunchiga eobsda):
   You’ll sometimes hear people say about someone that they have no nunchi (눈치 없다) meaning that they are socially awkward or lack any natural feel for the situation.

 Translations from Sofi to Korea. 

neighbours

a retired army sergeant of the originally farming, native Jaat community who memorized English prose for employment after completing his service, still works tiresslessly in his homegrown vegetable patch for his family of six—a daughter-in-law educated in medicine and twins in the mix—with produce to spare         for us.
two sisters with their joint Punjabi family who keep mostly to themselves behind an under-construction, austere facade, a family who all contribute to preparing dinnertime meals, even their kids. families from the state of Bihar, close to the side of the country where my parents’ hometown is. families, also, who migrated like us to this limb of the amoeba-like life we call Delhi—
stretching its contorted body
to relieve          the strain felt living
in congestion too long,
carefully breaching the neighbouring state’s boundaries with its extended body, like an artery reaching out from an overburdened heart to pump life into a stem-cell organ transplant.
families with working adults nevertheless commuting back to the core of the National Capital region everyday for work, just like my father: the long tedious hours of driving to and from the neighbouring metropol and         the burnout     pushing their biological clocks in time with a more rural rhythm while still
                   tick, tock ,
                        tick, tock ,
tick, tock ,
tick, tock , ticking with the demands of an urban lifestyle.

a friendly, working woman near the edge of the block married to an IIT graduate, protective of her little boys, another retiree from a familiar neighbourhood in East Delhi with green-painted walls the shade of new spring in the shadows; a Bengali lady with her withering in-law parents, lively kids and a miniature zoo within the wrought-iron gates—cages squeaking with the restlessness of the ostrich and the parrot; a lady of meditative faith running an aashram based in her home; a bright, mosaic-colored house with a toddler who loves savoury snacks and his paternal grandmother, and has a busy primary school-going sister; a childless couple with their extended family of wary, eager, overprotective dogs living in multiple houses, who run a social service for looking after them. their distrusting barks that used to envelop the streets at night have grown used to our presence now…
new people who recently moved in       and
the pair of dogs who befriended my family, manipulate my father into giving them milky treats even though they have made a habit of destroying his vegetable garden.
a shaggy, shy, gullible mother, and
her dominant, aggressive, distrusting son,
the two brown dogs who have learned to accept my presence when I am home for college breaks, the two loyal idiots who remind us so much of an older friend from that overburdened heart, of our past home.

Delhi

From The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, by Arundhati Roy

I look at the sickly pallor of the ill and the dying 
and tell myself that it is
not as evident on their faces as it seems.
So I look away.

---

I wonder what have we come to?
pomp reigning car-crowded streets
with the fanfare of cold indifference
choking the city’s lungs with smoke
from crop-burning in the extreme winter.
Minority-suppressing bigotry thriving
in the cold ashes of a historical partition
defending hate-crime over the muteness of an animal
mocking substance abuse in an 11 year old
whose reality is far from being food for laughter.
Why are we building walls
to forget our problems?
claustrophobic walls
that reek of distrust?

---

From the window I look outside
And I see a wilting tree shed its leaves all at once,
the ocher carpeting the surrounding ground.
A flock flies by overhead hurriedly,
screeching and flapping like an old ceiling fan.

I dare not look back into eyes
the eyes full of suffering in my city.

---

Featured image description: Connaught Place, New Delhi

Some Difficult Paybacks

Naomi Shihab Nye, Palestinian-American poet, writes about her father, about his kindness and optimism towards the world despite witnessing its darker sides as an enthusiastic journalist:

“He never gave up hope
Everything depended on mutual respect
the sadness of my father was a landmass underwater.”

Sanjay Lake Park, New Delhi, India

Tree standing in halo of morning light at Sanjay Lake Park

A chauffeur from my father’s place of work dropped off delicious kheer at our now bygone home in New Delhi on Eid this June while he was away shopping with my younger brother. He called to inform me about said person’s visit shortly before his arrival and asked me to tell my mother to invite him in and offer him refreshment as is tradition in Indian culture – especially important during the holiday season. He was on duty on that holiday too. I think my father told me how that person is very hard-working. The sentiment of respect must be mutual for both my father and his friend and colleague, Salim. I could not express the sweetness of the gesture in words or in thoughts, for the home-made delicacy that he brought with him and which we devoured soon afterwards. He hardly stayed more than a minute, whether out of hurry, or courtesy, or propriety, I could not tell. But I kept the memory of the sentiment long after he left.

Macroscopic world of public parks, Delhi NCR

During those summer months before I was to join university for my undergraduate studies – an exceedingly tumultuous time for any high school student – began the gradual process of my family’s migration to a city thirty nine kilometers from our older residence in the adjacent state. It was in these months that all of the permanent changes stamping my year took place. There was a rapid divergence from familiarity in this time period from my moving into simultaneously different places – a new home and a new hostel life some nine kilometers away from said home itself. Between the imposed walking that I preferred to do in my old city, and the necessary walking (within my sector, within my university) or bicycling to get to places that I began to do in this growing urban giant where rurality exists in separate niches, things seemed distant in multiple senses of the word…just as they did when I was still on the crossroads of academic choices. It is because I have always been a largely private person, the collective force of these changes might not have impressed themselves in my mind as strongly or as immediately as it does for a lot of people. With this instinct for introversion always comes a better attunement to distance and I have since learned to accept the slow pace of causality to a fault with me: with realization, with acceptance, with attunement, and with accommodation.

Panorama taken from the terrace of new residence

There are many things I learnt about within the last year about people, about places. Concerning a family friend is one particular anecdote that impressed itself deeply upon my memory – the woman who is practically an older sister to me and someone who is old enough to be now working, whose friend, the woman’s mother told me, has the highest opinions of her. This woman helped her friend through four difficult years of undergraduate studies alongside excelling her own because the friend, though studious herself, was a native of Rajasthan, where she had until that point attended school where instruction was provided via the monolingual medium of Hindi, which is to say that the friend naturally struggled with English. This person’s mother told me how the friend credits her professional achievements to her, for without her help, the friend believes, she would not be wherever she is today.

From the veranda, looking in

I look back on the Eid visit resulting in the box of kheer and on the story of the kindness of my distant sibling. I think of the very similar habit of selflessness in my father and I wonder: how are we ever to repay people who only know how to give?

---

Author’s note:

Hello, folks! If you know about my other (older, worse) venture called In-Between Lanes, you would know how inactive I have been there and how disorganized my blogging timeline has been. I know I promised there once to bring about a dramatic change, but that was lost to the series of dramatic changes that ended up happening to me. Ha! So if you’re reading this, I urge you, dear reader, to the most part to just overlook my silly writing on the other blog and try to be patient with the newer (hopefully better) one.

During my absence from the blogging sphere I was journal-ing over at another social media platform (okay, Instagram) and I am going to continue the narrative from there onward, which will be evident in the excerpts and photographs from that place which I will curate into this one. If you know me from both the platforms, you shall know what I mean. Find the comments section below to share your thoughts. Thanks for reading!