I

On the 27th of March this year, I moved from New Delhi to Melbourne for my doctoral research at La Trobe University. The trip to Melbourne was not only my first but also the first one abroad. Naturally, I felt nervous about how things would pan out. To my relief, though, the university had arranged a pick-up from the airport. I was to look out for a sign which said ‘TOGOTO' services. After I collected the luggage and went through some not-so-polite questioning at the immigration desk, I walked to the lobby and found a middle-aged woman waiting for me. Attired in the company's uniform, she looked like someone who had spent a lifetime doing the job she was doing that day—taking students like me to the university.

As I settled in the car rather uncomfortably on the seat beside her, I tried to think about what I should say to break the silence. “Where are you from?”, she asked, before I could open my mouth. “New Delhi, India”, I said politely. I thought it best to not burden her with the cultural complexities of migration within India. Delhi, actually, is only the place where I took my higher education. I was born in Bihar and grew up in different parts of the northeast, including Arunachal Pradesh and Meghalaya. “Do you have such roads there, such cleanliness?”, she prompted unconsciously moving her hand towards the windshield. I gently smiled to myself and thought the next thirty minutes or so to the campus would be spent easily; I would only need to respond to what she asks, without saying anything myself. “Well, some parts of India are quite clean but most of the country could do much better, I think,” I said, only to be surprisingly embarrassed. Nonetheless, I gathered myself and waited for the third volley. But nothing came from her. She switched on the stereo and started listening to traffic updates.

After having had enough of the unexpected and awkward silence, I began to make general conversation. I did not want to expose the fact that I hadn't cared to know much about Melbourne or even Australia before arriving. “You know, for most Indians, Australia means a great rivalry on the cricket field and cute but potentially threatening kangaroos in the forests and reserves,” I said with a confidence I suspect would have betrayed my anxiety. “And the Olympic Games in Sydney in 2000”, I added for good measure. She was unfazed. I thought I would go down without even drawing a ‘hmm' or ‘indeed' from her, but she was quick to respond, “Did you see what they did to Warner and Smith?” I was ‘stumped', to draw the appropriate metaphor from cricket.

Not knowing what to say, I gently asked her to explain. She said, “What Warner and Smithy did was wrong. But why ban them for a year? Many others from Asia have got much less...” And, I could see it on her face—she wanted to remind me of the economic privilege that Indians enjoyed as far as cricket was concerned. I nodded; I could not say anything that would have been adequate. It would be pointless, I thought, to tell her what she said wasn't right but also not completely untrue.

Something flashed through my mind. I felt that this moment, the moment of her bringing up Asia in the context of Warner and Smith will probably speak to the sheer out-of-placeness, incredulity and even discomfort that the narrator of A.K. Ramanujan's poem “The Highway Stripper” feels, once he discovers that the stripper on the highway wasn't a woman gladly receiving her lover's amorous affections, but a bespectacled, forty-year-old man who was driving alone on the highway to Mexico. The following is an excerpt:

Once as I was traveling
on a highway
to Mexico
behind a battered once-blue
Mustang with a dusty rear window,
the wind really sang
for me
when suddenly out of the side
of the speeding car
in front of me
a woman's hand
with a wrist watch on it
threw away
a series of whirling objects
on to the hurtling road:
a straw
hat,
a white shoe fit
to be a fetish,
then another,
a heavy pleated skirt
and a fluttery
slip, faded pink,
frayed lace-edge
and all
(I even heard it swish),
a leg-of-mutton blouse
Just as fluttery.

And as I stepped
on the gas
and my car lunged
into the fifty feet
between me
and them,
a rather ordinary,
used, and off-white bra
for smallish
breasts whirled off
the window
and struck
a farmer's barbed wire
with yellow-green wheat grass
beyond
and spread-eagled on it,
pinned
by the blowing wind.

Then before I knew,
bright red panties
laced with white
hit my windshield
and I flinched,
I swerved,
but then
it was gone,
swept aside
before I straightened up—
fortunately, no one else
on the road:
excited, curious
to see the stripper
on the highway,
maybe with an urgent
lover's one free hand,
(or were there more?)
on her breast
or thigh,
I stepped again
on the gas, frustrated by their
dusty rear window
at fifty feet
I passed them
at seventy.

In that absolute
second,
that glimpse and after—
image in this hell
of voyeurs, I saw
only one at the wheel:
a man,
about forty.

A spectacled profile.
looking only
at the road
beyond the nose of his Mustang,
with a football
radio on.

As I reached the campus, my discomfort did not end. Almost all the notice boards, walls, and pillars had “#StopAdani” posters on them. The entire university, it appeared, had conspired to remind me that an Indian industrialist, who wants to acquire coal-mining rights in the heart of Queensland in Australia, has no concern for the environmental impact of his proposed venture. In fact, the Great Barrier Reef, the Doongmabulla Springs complex, and the Black-Throated Finch continue to be caught within this corporate greed. At that moment, even as I knew that the woman's remark in the car was innocuous and had no connection with the #StopAdani campaign, I didn't feel at all comfortable so far in Melbourne. It seemed that I wasn't quite welcome to Australia. Yet, little did I know that things were to take a rather interesting turn soon.

II

At my supervisor's suggestion, I met her at State Library Victoria. On the way back, I took a detour towards the Library shop and gawked at all the good books that I couldn't afford. A brochure about the events at the Wheeler Centre caught my sight, events that had to do with books and writers. I picked it up once I made sure that it was free. Quickly running down the folded leaves, I noticed some familiar names: Kamila Shamsie among them. As I was about to dump it in my bag, I saw an announcement for an event called “Jenny Erpenbeck: European Facts and Fictions”, describing her as a writer who, in her latest novel Go, Went, Gone, has turned her attention to “one of the great moral challenges facing Europe this century—mass human displacement and the refugee crisis.” The leaflet invited those in Melbourne for an evening where Erpenbeck would discuss “her life and work and the dimensions of history.”

I was stumped again, as I simply could not understand what was happening. One the one hand, Melbourne reminded me of the ‘injustice' that had been meted out to Warner and Smith and on the other, it was laying out the red carpet for a writer who probably represents the most eloquent and empathetic voice in contemporary fiction concerning refugees. Surprised and confused, one of my considerations at the time was to avoid engaging. So, I decided to go back to familiar territory and said yes to a former teacher's request for the translation of a long piece from Hindi (my first language) to English. In my head, I had developed a synonymous relationship between Melbourne and English; I felt that reading and translating Hindi would be a way of avoiding engagement with the city. Resolve often feeds into intensity. I sent the first draft of the translation to the author as well as my teacher in just three days.

III

“Chinmaya ji, anuvaad toh achcha hai lekin kahin kahin par aapke alag cultural background ke karan aur aapke aashay nahin samajh paane ke karan kami reh gayi hai” (Chinmaya, the translation looks alright but there are shortcomings at a few places—because of our distinct cultural backgrounds and also because you haven't quite understood the meaning.)

The writer need not have said more. I'd been stung. I was slighted enough already, by being told over email that I'd not understood the meaning of some of his constructions. The sugar-coating, the allusion to “distinct cultural backgrounds,” was just adding insult to injury. I immediately apologised, of course, and offered to send a revised draft to him at the earliest possible but did not convey to him what was a much bigger anxiety within me. “Where is my home then?”, I was asking myself. The answer clearly wasn't Melbourne, for the city had been sending mixed signals, but now it seemed that I wasn't at home even in India, in Hindi, in my own language.

IV

A much-needed clarity came from Barbara Cassin's Nostalgia: When Are We Ever at Home? A philosopher and philologist, her book came to my rescue. I accidentally found it while perusing her better-known works on Heidegger and the question of untranslatability. Cassin not only discovers a certain deracination as lying at the heart of nostalgia—usually understood as an intense longing for one's roots—but also exposes as to how thinking about nostalgia is linked to thinking about languages and dwelling in the world.

Cassin underlines the fact that even as the word ‘nostalgia' sounds Greek (literally, the pain of return, a combination of nostos meaning return and algos implying pain or suffering), it is actually Swiss, Swiss-German to be precise. The Historical Dictionary of the French Language (1678) tells us that Jean-Jacques Harder had used the word to describe the homesickness from which Louis XIV's Swiss mercenaries suffered. Alternately, it could have been coined by Johans or Jean Hofer in 1688, who devoted his short doctoral dissertation at the University of Basel to a certain ‘nostalgic' condition of illness from which certain “young people” suffered. Irrespective of the story we choose to believe between Harder and Hofer's, it is very interesting to note that there is absolutely no Greek origin of the word that, in a sense, captures the very spirit of the entire Odyssey.

In fact, as Cassin points out, there is some irony in the fact that the Odyssey is renowned as the text in which Odysseus accomplishes his nostalgic desire to return to Ithaca; as when he reaches the island, he is unable to recognise the place. He is anxious and scared as everything appears different, uncanny, and strange to him. It takes Athena (disguised as a boy) to describe the locale to him and call it “Ithaca” for order to be restored amidst all the bewilderment. Odysseus is united with his son and wife again. Yet, he soon must leave Ithaca for another voyage. The return to the home, in other words, proves to be only a temporary one, for Odysseus knew that he had to ship towards the Mediterranean and then away from it, once more.

The second figure that has Cassin's attention in Nostalgia is Aeneas as described by Virgil. Aeneas appears to present a contrast to Odysseus in that he is an immigrant, an exile and is out to find ‘new' roots for himself. Nostalgic for the Troy which has fallen, forcing him to flee with his father on his back, he will build Italy (and Rome)—but not without there being a twist in the tale. He won't speak Greek but must familiarise himself with Latin for the language of the other will come to interrupt his mother-tongue. Such interruption, as Cassin astutely points out, is precisely the moment when translation comes into being—the moment where it is impossible that the Romans are not privy to two languages.

The discussion of the relationship between nostalgia, home, and language in Cassin's book concludes with an insightful explanation about Hannah Arendt. Arendt, while in the United States as a naturalised citizen, held on to the German as a ‘mother-tongue' and thus made a distinction between mother-tongue/homeland and fatherland. She, however, never allowed the mother-tongue to essentialise into a static totality. German for her, Cassin argues, was produced as energeia and not ergon, as she could be inventive in the language. She could resist clichés and banality, be reflexive and critical towards her own constructions. Her German in New York, in other words, was exiled from Germany itself, as it was so different from the German of the National Socialists. It was a German that co-existed in shared bonds of love with other tongues like French, English, Latin, and Greek.

I read Cassin's account of nostalgia, the desire to be at home, indeed very carefully only to arrive at the stark realisation that her argument seems to be that we all, in different ways, are exiles. This recognition altered the confusion that I faced before I had read her work, and quite dramatically so. The question now for me was no longer about finding home. Rather, it became about one's response to the fact that all of humanity, in a sense, survives in a state of exile—a state of never being at home anywhere. Cassin, in her inimitable manner further complicates the problem, by underlining the fact that we live in a diverse world which demands innovation from us in languages that are not our mother-tongues. In other words, the challenge before us is to be innovative even in those languages that function as the other to us.

Cassin's answer to the demand, at the risk of simplification, is translation. She understands translation as the awareness that when we speak one, we actually speak two—a space of intimacy between two languages. Much like the condition of exile does not allow any assurance to the emigrant, Cassin wants readers of Nostalgia to translate among the languages of the world without any relent or rest, without enjoying any comforts or assurances.

Will I be able to respond responsibly to the condition of my exile? To translate between Hindi and English, between India and Melbourne? Perhaps, these are not the best questions to ask. The question is and will always be, whether I have the courage to pursue translation without ever allowing myself to be comfortable in the process. Time will tell, I suppose.

* Specifically, the edition translated into English by Pascale-Anne Brault, with a foreword by Soulemane Bachir Diagne. Published by Fordham University Press of New York, in 2016. // return