Cocoon
by Sukhada Tatke
Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night feeling that I am emptying myself out of my body. Not peeling away from the bed too high or too far, but just hovering high enough and far enough to see a different life play out. I am in another house. In another country. Who, then, is this person taking up space inside my frame at this moment while also inhabiting my other selves in other rooms?
Some nights, when I turn in my sleep towards the window, I expect to see moonlight coursing through the rustling leaves on the tree outside, wedging in from the grille and onto my bed. But there is no moon on the other side. In that transient second before I realise that what I inhale is only a memory of the moon as I would see it from another window in another house, I want to pluck it from the sky, hold it in my hands and bury it deep within me.
Before I left Mumbai ten years ago, I had never experienced this kind of dislocation. My body did not have to try on different selves like clothes to see which one fit best. There was never a moment when I wondered if my shape moving through my surroundings was like dust—blown and scattered before settling where the breath took it. My shape was solid, nicely fitting the mould that was made for it.
But now, when I am in one home, I think of the one I have left behind; when in another, I imagine the one yet to come. There haven’t been all that many dwellings after all—two in France, one in Houston and two in in Edinburgh, including the one I now live in. And then there is a place that evokes most strongly the overwhelming feeling of home, which is nearly 5,000 miles away from me, kissing the Arabian Sea.
For most of my life, my whole world was contained there, in Mumbai, in my line of vision, no less: the colony I grew up in, the 350 square feet flat I occupied with my mother and grandparents, the large playground outside my building, the grandfatherly sentinel that is the jamun tree beside it, and my friends in the neighbouring buildings. I had everything I needed and wanted. There were no plans of venturing too far, no dreams either. The tree was bound to grow where the roots were planted.
The truth, though, is that my roots had been planted elsewhere, in a town called Chinchwad, near Pune. Every year, during the summer school break, we stayed there, my mother and I. It is there that I lost her little by little. Or that’s what I wrongly thought as a child. The insuperable feeling would wash over me every time the rickshaw came to a halt before a building she had called home. Right there had been a life within her grasp, but snatched away before it could blossom: my father died a young man, and we moved in with my mother’s parents in Mumbai. Her childhood home seamlessly became mine.
My connection to my own home of origin, meanwhile, remained tenuous at best. With no maps of longing or belonging, I felt like a prisoner there. In the small, one-bedroom, blue-walled flat in Chinchwad, I would trace my mother’s footsteps on the dusty floor as she swept and swabbed. I would peer into the weaves of cobwebs and peel off loose flecks from the walls so that the chipped paint presented a mosaic of pretty motifs. The air was always sweet and musty from months of being trapped inside.
What stifled me liberated my mother. Those summer holidays stand before my eyes, limpid as glass. The days opened with the distant call of the cuckoo and the nearby crowing of roosters. The windows trembled in the bellowing wind. The silence, at other times, was so radiantly transparent that any small sound reverberated off the invisible contours of calm. I played with friends who greeted my annual visits with an enthusiasm I lacked but welcomed. I loved them. Soon, they all left, one by one, for posh flats in posh buildings. I was left with big holes and bigger yawns. Strangers replaced neighbours who had journeyed alongside us as custodians of our history.
The town, too, tried to keep pace with the rapidly changing world of the nineties. Now these old narrow lanes. Now these city-like aspirations. This seemingly dead settlement was coming alive. New constructions rose everywhere, bringing with them walls and fences. Old shops made way to fancier ones.
The flat could not staunch the march of time either. One year, the electricity metre broke down. Then the television crashed. Later, the fridge. Another summer, it became impossible to wipe off the bountiful offerings of pigeons that were caked on the floor. One year, my mother cleared all the pots lining the balcony because now they only held fossils of plants in desiccated soil. The house was slowly fading like a beloved ageing person.
At some point, my mother decided to give away all the clothes that had belonged to my father. I wondered but never asked why she had kept them for so long. She urged me to pick a keepsake—I chose a pair of white trousers which, many years later, would fit me as if they were tailored for my own lower extremities.
The presence of this small apartment was a reminder of the huge absence in my life. By the time I was an adolescent, I started voicing my newfound rebellion. Why don’t you sell the house? Why don’t you rent it? What’s the point of keeping it? If my callousness broke my mother’s spirit, she did not show it. Our annual visits were now restricted to a couple of days, or sometimes, a few hours, which worked for me. Years passed. The flat lingered in my life like a bay leaf in curry, making no difference whether it was there or not.
It was early spring in Edinburgh two years ago when a friend in Mumbai lost his father. His mother had died a few years earlier. He sent me a photo of him as a child—an only child like me—flanked by his parents and dog. With it, these words: “I’m the only one of the family left in the world today.”
My heart exploded at the special kind of homelessness that must come with losing both parents. That afternoon, I walked to the Water of Leith which flowed like a golden stream of honey, the sun glinting on its surface. Birds sang and water burbled. Buds were manifest on bare trees. Crocuses and daffodils embroidered the muddy path along the river. I picked some fresh blooms from the ground and brought them home to embark on an experiment. I gently wrapped a few petals in paper and positioned them under mounds of heavy books. A few days later, a sole purple petal of a crocus was transformed. Sucked of all the moisture, it was now thread thin and translucent, so delicate that I treated it like a newborn. I placed the petal—dead yet breathing remarkable aliveness into its new form—between the folds of a letter and sent my friend this piece of my home as his own had pulled apart.
When my father died, I was too little to fathom the loss of a parent, much less of a home. But in the Chinchwad flat, the signs were everywhere. I caught glimpses of his handwriting on the wall where he marked my growing height, on copies of prescriptions he wrote for his patients, and on old letters my mother often had her nose in. Before his cupboard was emptied, I would sniff his clothes for traces of something, anything. In old albums, I searched for myself in him. I wished I had known his voice, his laugh, so that it could have rung in my head and drowned the booming silence of this house.
It was there that my mother sometimes asked me questions like: “Do you remember how sad he would be when you cried? How he always took you to another doctor for an injection because he couldn’t bear to prick you?” Or: “Do you remember we went to the fountain every evening on his scooter, after he returned from work?” I don’t think I ever replied. Once, she asked if I remembered him at all. Yes, I answered coolly, hoping she wouldn’t catch my lie.
But maybe I was not lying at all. Who is to say that stories heard repeatedly, and that latch on to a mysterious part of our consciousness, are not our own stories? I magicked my father into being by clinging to whatever few titbits I gathered about him. This is how I made him mine. I brought to life what I believe was the perfect past of a potentially perfect future.
I never asked about the green scooter in the parking lot of the building, and I don’t remember ever being told that it was what my father was riding when the truck hit him. It was knowledge inherited. I glanced at the scooter only from the corner of my eyes, as though it were the sun and any direct contact with it would scorch me. Sometimes, though, I would casually touch it, or during a game of hide and seek, I would take shelter behind it, hoping it would keep me from being seen.
Losing a parent feels like the ultimate loss of shelter, of geography. How to orient oneself without a compass? How to live without a roof, exposed to the elements? These were not questions that assailed me when I was growing up. They started gnawing at me when I moved from one country to another after marrying the man I loved.
It was a moderately hot monsoon day when my mother, my soon-to-be-husband D, and I arrived in Chinchwad. A few months earlier, out of the clear blue sky, my mother had pronounced her intention to sell the flat. We were here to complete the formalities and to take stock: what to schlep back with us, what to leave behind. For more than two decades, my mother had guarded this nucleus of ours like a talisman, allowing nobody else to take ownership of it, nor even tenancy. And here she was now, giving up on the life she had held on to, perhaps to make way for a new one for me. Something about her decision took the strength out of my feet. This house I had railed against in childish craze had been my point of departure, after all, one that had set me off but would no longer be around as my safe harbour were my wings to break mid-flight.
The door opened to that familiar stuffy smell. The floor was carpeted by dust as always. Cobwebs latticed blameless corners. This time, we did not bother with the cleaning. Moving around the flat that last day felt like meandering through a life not lived. I ran my fingers on the walls, the built-in cupboard, the kitchen top, the sink, the bathroom door.
It flowed out of me like a river, this unlived life of endless potentialities. What of the fluxes that led me here? What of the tides that took me away? No matter. It was the path that was never trod that steered me to this sweet man who was now following me wordlessly, occasionally squeezing my shoulder or curving his arm around my waist, so that I could keep steady. I had no stories for him, except for the one that had become folklore merely by virtue of retelling. I told him about the time a snake had crawled up our sewage hole and made itself at home on the tiles of the loo, depositing in my mother a forever fear of not snakes but unknown toilet doors. This was not my memory, of course. It was a hand-me-down remembrance from my mother.
The house had always been the past for me; now it stood on the precipice of history. But the home? The home-to-be or the home-that-never-was was, even if only my phantom life, my life. I may have no recollection, but I am certain that tucked within my subconscious are images of the first steps I took on that terrazzo floor, the new words that formed and jostled in my head, finding utterance for the first time under that roof, the definitive comfort my body must have felt waddling within those cerulean walls. Had that long-forsaken home unwittingly become the yardstick against which I came to measure my future homes?
Until you are dislodged, then discombobulated in the process, home is not something you pay much attention to. It simply is. Like the air you breathe. The heartache of homesickness came to me in all its fullness when I left Mumbai for Texas after marriage, exactly a year after my mother sold the Chinchwad flat. The feeling followed me for a decade as I moved from India to the US, from the US to France, and from France to the United Kingdom.
My displacement has been nothing of the kind that countless others have had to suffer through the ages. I have not fled persecution or war. I am not in exile. My country is not yet entirely ravaged by the climate catastrophe. I can return anytime I want. And yet, I think my sudden expulsion from the Chinchwad home at a young age belatedly dented my vision of a horizon.
Given how often I return to Mumbai, it feels like I never left. Even so, the chariot of time gallops forward, saturating my visits with a sense of in-betweenness. I seem to hover between here and there, now and then, my current life and the one I lead in an alternate universe where I never leave.
After my last visit there, earlier this year, something happened. I felt a prickle in my stomach as the front wheels of the plane lifted and then, within seconds, the back wheels too. I gazed out till the lights of my forever-awake home city blurred, dimmed and evaporated completely. I had taken off from Mumbai countless times before, but this time as I coasted higher and higher into the effable darkness of the sky, I was dwarfed by the sheer expanse of the world. I wanted my city to shrink to the size of my palms, so that I could have it before my eyes forever and never let it leave me. I know I was the one leaving again.
What I was leaving this time was not the concrete hunk of the city. It was my mother. My unplanned visit had been occasioned by her sudden illness. It did not turn out to be serious or long but was enough of a reminder that she was getting on in years as I was building my life thousands of miles away. That she is a person, but is equally a place I call home. Having lived my whole life in half a home, I was now terrified of flying away. What would happen if it disappeared altogether?
In writing this essay, I set out to reify the abstract yearning for a home that does not exist. I wanted to turn that yearning into something tactile. Willing physicality into being would alleviate the unnameable sadness of being unmoored, I thought. What you can touch, after all, is never too far from you. Instead, I have ended up trundling backwards. What I long for, I now understand, is the impossibility of the circling return.
Sometimes, when I look at the ever-growing cluster of plants in our home, I wonder how they thrive, these tropical beings so hungry for light, in the sunless landscape of the North. When I see seagulls and magpies going about their daily lives, I marvel at the strength they find within themselves, these dwellers of the firmament, to stitch together nest after intricate nest when their earlier attempts get blown out of trees or rooftops. When I look at the moon hanging low outside my window, I think of how the same moon is distributed, like my splintered self, across various places and people of the globe I have loved and also lost.
I know the same moon is suspended in the lambent horizon of Chinchwad, a city in its own right now, thick with industrial energy, bursting to the seams with shops and establishments, amid which stands an old building which was brand new when a young couple laid their eyes on it several years ago and settled on a ground-floor flat to begin their conjugal life in, and on whose threshold I stood hopelessly immobile a couple of decades later, minutes before my mother turned the key into the lock—both of which would be someone else’s soon—closing the door one last time, after which we turned and came face to face with a wall where we found an ancient engraving of the names of my first-ever friends who no longer lived there but whose presence somehow got permanently marked by someone who thought to marry knife to wall, and in that carved roster, I read my own name too, a small comfort that is now at home in my chest, following me wherever I go, a beautiful, steady companion in my peripatetic life—my very own cocoon just before it cracked open.
Some nights, when I turn in my sleep towards the window, I expect to see moonlight coursing through the rustling leaves on the tree outside, wedging in from the grille and onto my bed. But there is no moon on the other side. In that transient second before I realise that what I inhale is only a memory of the moon as I would see it from another window in another house, I want to pluck it from the sky, hold it in my hands and bury it deep within me.
Before I left Mumbai ten years ago, I had never experienced this kind of dislocation. My body did not have to try on different selves like clothes to see which one fit best. There was never a moment when I wondered if my shape moving through my surroundings was like dust—blown and scattered before settling where the breath took it. My shape was solid, nicely fitting the mould that was made for it.
But now, when I am in one home, I think of the one I have left behind; when in another, I imagine the one yet to come. There haven’t been all that many dwellings after all—two in France, one in Houston and two in in Edinburgh, including the one I now live in. And then there is a place that evokes most strongly the overwhelming feeling of home, which is nearly 5,000 miles away from me, kissing the Arabian Sea.
For most of my life, my whole world was contained there, in Mumbai, in my line of vision, no less: the colony I grew up in, the 350 square feet flat I occupied with my mother and grandparents, the large playground outside my building, the grandfatherly sentinel that is the jamun tree beside it, and my friends in the neighbouring buildings. I had everything I needed and wanted. There were no plans of venturing too far, no dreams either. The tree was bound to grow where the roots were planted.
The truth, though, is that my roots had been planted elsewhere, in a town called Chinchwad, near Pune. Every year, during the summer school break, we stayed there, my mother and I. It is there that I lost her little by little. Or that’s what I wrongly thought as a child. The insuperable feeling would wash over me every time the rickshaw came to a halt before a building she had called home. Right there had been a life within her grasp, but snatched away before it could blossom: my father died a young man, and we moved in with my mother’s parents in Mumbai. Her childhood home seamlessly became mine.
My connection to my own home of origin, meanwhile, remained tenuous at best. With no maps of longing or belonging, I felt like a prisoner there. In the small, one-bedroom, blue-walled flat in Chinchwad, I would trace my mother’s footsteps on the dusty floor as she swept and swabbed. I would peer into the weaves of cobwebs and peel off loose flecks from the walls so that the chipped paint presented a mosaic of pretty motifs. The air was always sweet and musty from months of being trapped inside.
What stifled me liberated my mother. Those summer holidays stand before my eyes, limpid as glass. The days opened with the distant call of the cuckoo and the nearby crowing of roosters. The windows trembled in the bellowing wind. The silence, at other times, was so radiantly transparent that any small sound reverberated off the invisible contours of calm. I played with friends who greeted my annual visits with an enthusiasm I lacked but welcomed. I loved them. Soon, they all left, one by one, for posh flats in posh buildings. I was left with big holes and bigger yawns. Strangers replaced neighbours who had journeyed alongside us as custodians of our history.
The town, too, tried to keep pace with the rapidly changing world of the nineties. Now these old narrow lanes. Now these city-like aspirations. This seemingly dead settlement was coming alive. New constructions rose everywhere, bringing with them walls and fences. Old shops made way to fancier ones.
The flat could not staunch the march of time either. One year, the electricity metre broke down. Then the television crashed. Later, the fridge. Another summer, it became impossible to wipe off the bountiful offerings of pigeons that were caked on the floor. One year, my mother cleared all the pots lining the balcony because now they only held fossils of plants in desiccated soil. The house was slowly fading like a beloved ageing person.
At some point, my mother decided to give away all the clothes that had belonged to my father. I wondered but never asked why she had kept them for so long. She urged me to pick a keepsake—I chose a pair of white trousers which, many years later, would fit me as if they were tailored for my own lower extremities.
The presence of this small apartment was a reminder of the huge absence in my life. By the time I was an adolescent, I started voicing my newfound rebellion. Why don’t you sell the house? Why don’t you rent it? What’s the point of keeping it? If my callousness broke my mother’s spirit, she did not show it. Our annual visits were now restricted to a couple of days, or sometimes, a few hours, which worked for me. Years passed. The flat lingered in my life like a bay leaf in curry, making no difference whether it was there or not.
It was early spring in Edinburgh two years ago when a friend in Mumbai lost his father. His mother had died a few years earlier. He sent me a photo of him as a child—an only child like me—flanked by his parents and dog. With it, these words: “I’m the only one of the family left in the world today.”
My heart exploded at the special kind of homelessness that must come with losing both parents. That afternoon, I walked to the Water of Leith which flowed like a golden stream of honey, the sun glinting on its surface. Birds sang and water burbled. Buds were manifest on bare trees. Crocuses and daffodils embroidered the muddy path along the river. I picked some fresh blooms from the ground and brought them home to embark on an experiment. I gently wrapped a few petals in paper and positioned them under mounds of heavy books. A few days later, a sole purple petal of a crocus was transformed. Sucked of all the moisture, it was now thread thin and translucent, so delicate that I treated it like a newborn. I placed the petal—dead yet breathing remarkable aliveness into its new form—between the folds of a letter and sent my friend this piece of my home as his own had pulled apart.
When my father died, I was too little to fathom the loss of a parent, much less of a home. But in the Chinchwad flat, the signs were everywhere. I caught glimpses of his handwriting on the wall where he marked my growing height, on copies of prescriptions he wrote for his patients, and on old letters my mother often had her nose in. Before his cupboard was emptied, I would sniff his clothes for traces of something, anything. In old albums, I searched for myself in him. I wished I had known his voice, his laugh, so that it could have rung in my head and drowned the booming silence of this house.
It was there that my mother sometimes asked me questions like: “Do you remember how sad he would be when you cried? How he always took you to another doctor for an injection because he couldn’t bear to prick you?” Or: “Do you remember we went to the fountain every evening on his scooter, after he returned from work?” I don’t think I ever replied. Once, she asked if I remembered him at all. Yes, I answered coolly, hoping she wouldn’t catch my lie.
But maybe I was not lying at all. Who is to say that stories heard repeatedly, and that latch on to a mysterious part of our consciousness, are not our own stories? I magicked my father into being by clinging to whatever few titbits I gathered about him. This is how I made him mine. I brought to life what I believe was the perfect past of a potentially perfect future.
I never asked about the green scooter in the parking lot of the building, and I don’t remember ever being told that it was what my father was riding when the truck hit him. It was knowledge inherited. I glanced at the scooter only from the corner of my eyes, as though it were the sun and any direct contact with it would scorch me. Sometimes, though, I would casually touch it, or during a game of hide and seek, I would take shelter behind it, hoping it would keep me from being seen.
Losing a parent feels like the ultimate loss of shelter, of geography. How to orient oneself without a compass? How to live without a roof, exposed to the elements? These were not questions that assailed me when I was growing up. They started gnawing at me when I moved from one country to another after marrying the man I loved.
It was a moderately hot monsoon day when my mother, my soon-to-be-husband D, and I arrived in Chinchwad. A few months earlier, out of the clear blue sky, my mother had pronounced her intention to sell the flat. We were here to complete the formalities and to take stock: what to schlep back with us, what to leave behind. For more than two decades, my mother had guarded this nucleus of ours like a talisman, allowing nobody else to take ownership of it, nor even tenancy. And here she was now, giving up on the life she had held on to, perhaps to make way for a new one for me. Something about her decision took the strength out of my feet. This house I had railed against in childish craze had been my point of departure, after all, one that had set me off but would no longer be around as my safe harbour were my wings to break mid-flight.
The door opened to that familiar stuffy smell. The floor was carpeted by dust as always. Cobwebs latticed blameless corners. This time, we did not bother with the cleaning. Moving around the flat that last day felt like meandering through a life not lived. I ran my fingers on the walls, the built-in cupboard, the kitchen top, the sink, the bathroom door.
It flowed out of me like a river, this unlived life of endless potentialities. What of the fluxes that led me here? What of the tides that took me away? No matter. It was the path that was never trod that steered me to this sweet man who was now following me wordlessly, occasionally squeezing my shoulder or curving his arm around my waist, so that I could keep steady. I had no stories for him, except for the one that had become folklore merely by virtue of retelling. I told him about the time a snake had crawled up our sewage hole and made itself at home on the tiles of the loo, depositing in my mother a forever fear of not snakes but unknown toilet doors. This was not my memory, of course. It was a hand-me-down remembrance from my mother.
The house had always been the past for me; now it stood on the precipice of history. But the home? The home-to-be or the home-that-never-was was, even if only my phantom life, my life. I may have no recollection, but I am certain that tucked within my subconscious are images of the first steps I took on that terrazzo floor, the new words that formed and jostled in my head, finding utterance for the first time under that roof, the definitive comfort my body must have felt waddling within those cerulean walls. Had that long-forsaken home unwittingly become the yardstick against which I came to measure my future homes?
Until you are dislodged, then discombobulated in the process, home is not something you pay much attention to. It simply is. Like the air you breathe. The heartache of homesickness came to me in all its fullness when I left Mumbai for Texas after marriage, exactly a year after my mother sold the Chinchwad flat. The feeling followed me for a decade as I moved from India to the US, from the US to France, and from France to the United Kingdom.
My displacement has been nothing of the kind that countless others have had to suffer through the ages. I have not fled persecution or war. I am not in exile. My country is not yet entirely ravaged by the climate catastrophe. I can return anytime I want. And yet, I think my sudden expulsion from the Chinchwad home at a young age belatedly dented my vision of a horizon.
Given how often I return to Mumbai, it feels like I never left. Even so, the chariot of time gallops forward, saturating my visits with a sense of in-betweenness. I seem to hover between here and there, now and then, my current life and the one I lead in an alternate universe where I never leave.
After my last visit there, earlier this year, something happened. I felt a prickle in my stomach as the front wheels of the plane lifted and then, within seconds, the back wheels too. I gazed out till the lights of my forever-awake home city blurred, dimmed and evaporated completely. I had taken off from Mumbai countless times before, but this time as I coasted higher and higher into the effable darkness of the sky, I was dwarfed by the sheer expanse of the world. I wanted my city to shrink to the size of my palms, so that I could have it before my eyes forever and never let it leave me. I know I was the one leaving again.
What I was leaving this time was not the concrete hunk of the city. It was my mother. My unplanned visit had been occasioned by her sudden illness. It did not turn out to be serious or long but was enough of a reminder that she was getting on in years as I was building my life thousands of miles away. That she is a person, but is equally a place I call home. Having lived my whole life in half a home, I was now terrified of flying away. What would happen if it disappeared altogether?
In writing this essay, I set out to reify the abstract yearning for a home that does not exist. I wanted to turn that yearning into something tactile. Willing physicality into being would alleviate the unnameable sadness of being unmoored, I thought. What you can touch, after all, is never too far from you. Instead, I have ended up trundling backwards. What I long for, I now understand, is the impossibility of the circling return.
Sometimes, when I look at the ever-growing cluster of plants in our home, I wonder how they thrive, these tropical beings so hungry for light, in the sunless landscape of the North. When I see seagulls and magpies going about their daily lives, I marvel at the strength they find within themselves, these dwellers of the firmament, to stitch together nest after intricate nest when their earlier attempts get blown out of trees or rooftops. When I look at the moon hanging low outside my window, I think of how the same moon is distributed, like my splintered self, across various places and people of the globe I have loved and also lost.
I know the same moon is suspended in the lambent horizon of Chinchwad, a city in its own right now, thick with industrial energy, bursting to the seams with shops and establishments, amid which stands an old building which was brand new when a young couple laid their eyes on it several years ago and settled on a ground-floor flat to begin their conjugal life in, and on whose threshold I stood hopelessly immobile a couple of decades later, minutes before my mother turned the key into the lock—both of which would be someone else’s soon—closing the door one last time, after which we turned and came face to face with a wall where we found an ancient engraving of the names of my first-ever friends who no longer lived there but whose presence somehow got permanently marked by someone who thought to marry knife to wall, and in that carved roster, I read my own name too, a small comfort that is now at home in my chest, following me wherever I go, a beautiful, steady companion in my peripatetic life—my very own cocoon just before it cracked open.
Sukhada Tatke is an Indian writer based in Edinburgh. She writes on culture, books, history, gender, among other things. Her essays and features have been published in LitHub, The Rumpus, Commonwealth Writers' adda, Al Jazeera, Wired, BBC, Juggernaut, etc. Her writing has been featured on the Longreads and Longform reading lists.
