On the Indian experience of living in Europe.

The other day I was speaking with a friend in India who explained how happy he gets when his phone is out of coverage, how liberated he feels when he is spared the trouble of having to respond to calls or messages. I knew what he was talking about because I identified with that feeling. But I asked myself how is it possible that I could identify with what he felt when I generally have my phone at hand, always ready to respond to any call or message that I receive? The answer was simple. The Tess who identified with that friend was the one who lived in India. The Tess who lived in Pardubice could not wait for her phone to buzz with what could perhaps just be a Whatsapp group message. Thank God for the difference between these two Tesses. If it had not been for that I would have never been grateful for the many things that I was accustomed to back in India, things that we Indians take for granted.

That I am home-sick (actually country-sick) and waiting to go back to India is quite obvious. But what is getting clearer to me is that this case of country-sickness is way deeper than it seems. A couple of months ago I had this near-epiphanic moment when I realized that returning to India was the thing which would make me happier. At that point of time I seemed to be the only Indian here who wanted to go back. My Indian friend who started out here along with me 3 years ago could not stop telling me till recently about how much he loved Czech. In fact he said that he wished to live in a village here and run a farm. Knowing him, I believed that he would actually try do it. So I was surprised when it started becoming obvious to me that none of the Indians here are happy. I thought that it was my mind playing tricks on me, processing only the kind of information that justified what I had been feeling but lately, I realised that no tricks were being played and there is something clearly going wrong for us. The Indians here are either moving to other European cities with a larger Indian population or simply going back. Even my friend who wanted to live a farmer’s life here told me last week said that he was done with this place and just needed to go back to India. And it has nothing to do with the city we live in. There is nothing we lack here in terms of the material things we need to live and Prague is just a short train-ride away and always at a reachable distance if we need to get some ‘city-feel’.

Why am I complaining you may ask considering a significant percentage of Indians are living comfortably in Europe. Which are these places where they live? England, Germany, Belgium, France, Italy, Spain? Of course we Indians are moving to those places because there are already many people from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh living there. Not just that, a city like London or even Rome has got so well accustomed to being home to foreigners that the general atmosphere in these cities has changed and the Europeans living here are increasingly becoming atypical of how the stereotypical European is. But living in Central or Eastern Europe is a different ball game altogether. There are not many Asians here, let alone Indians. And you realize you are an alien here when you get stared at and mostly admired for looking different- the way exotic people look on television. These are people who have mostly not stepped out of their countries or even gone past a few cities close to where they live. May I dare say that you will not find a lot of difference between the people who lived here during medieval times and those who live here now with regard to their attitude towards eastern peoples and their culture? Sure, times have changed and the world has apparently become more global but there is only so much that technology and other progressive sciences can do until there is a strong and earnest effort made to educate them on eastern culture and dispel their suspicion and disregard of the same.

3 years is not long enough a period for me to have learnt to live comfortably here. Being someone who takes good advise seriously, I surmised that the best thing to do to understand cultural difference is to not be friends with Asians and especially Indians here. When I first came here I was so much in awe of everything I saw, the beautiful flowers, the well-maintained streets, the old buildings and what not? Living abroad was never a dream that I had had but being here made me question why I had not had such glorious dreams before. While I was basking in all the wonderful things this world had to offer me, a few months into my stay here, I was told by the wisest man I know, who had lived here for decades, that there would be times when things stop making sense, when everything numbs down, when you’ll walk with tears rolling down your cheeks but there will be no one in the vicinity to even notice that you are crying. Then there would be those times when the sun disappears for months and the days are really short giving you a very small window to be outside while it is not dark and freezing and those days will take a toll on your mental and physical well-being. That you may have a huge social circle but no one to call upon at times when you knew you were falling into pieces. I was told to find a boyfriend here (preferably Czech but any European would do) because the physical intimacy that the relationship could provide would be the most important comfort I would find here. While the last piece of advice made sense, I could not fully believe that I would go through all that had been mentioned. Living in India makes you naturally hate heat. The Sun is your enemy and the monsoons are loved precisely because the earth cools down. In India you are always surrounded by friends and family, most of the times suffocated by them and those few days that you get to live alone in your apartment is such a welcome breather. Oh, and do not get me started on the very romanticised idea of traveling solo. Of course we think it is a wonderful thing. It lets us be alone, far from the maddening crowd of our folks for a while. Having grown up fancying cloudy-days, living alone and having quite-times to myself, I could not imagine hating a situation where there would be no Sun, the opportunity to live alone in an apartment or having non-crowded and clean streets at my disposal to walk on. But it all came true. In steps. Without me noticing. And just about when I started noticing the effect these things were having on me, it all suddenly came crashing down. And then I experienced it all. Walking with tears streaming down with not a single person in the vicinity. Having good friends from your social circle to call upon but either them not being able to understand what you were going through or being equally broken which made meetings with them a pity party where they and I would drink and lament about the emptiness, worthlessness and pointlessness of life. Yes, all those post-World War II literature on existential crisis now seemed to be talking about me. You are simply left defenceless in the face of what I can now only call a Black hole. Endocrinologists and psychotherapists are consulted because people close to you can definitely sense something wrong. They confirm that your lack of Vitamin D and B2 are causing you to ‘feel blue’. And if you are a woman, chances are that your body will take quite some time to get used to the environment here. Need I mention the emotional havoc a hormonal imbalance could cause? All these factor in along with what to us Indians would seem to be cold and distant behaviour of the people here. Several months pass and by some stroke of fortune you go from that point where you have lost the willingness to fight this feeling to getting  back on your feet. This stage of getting back on your feet does not make the road ahead simpler. I have often heard of the ‘The five stages of Grief’. It begins with denial, anger, bargaining, leading to depression and finally acceptance. I do not know if it is a valid theory but you sure can thank your lucky stars if you manage to get to the stage when you can accept things. Accept that it is next to impossible to find the warmth that you are used to back home in this place, accept that even if you think you have managed to stand on your feet, you can still fall; accept that the time lost in being lost can be made up for in some way or the other, accept that dwelling on what happened and what you went through, will yield no good results unless you learn to reflect on your experience; accept that if you have not learnt to reflect on your experience all you can do is simply keep trudging ahead till you know you have done some decent justice to the work you came here to do, take the help of every little thing that seems to keep your spirits from falling low- like have those phases of making Dubsmashes or awakening to the fact that Instagram gives you the unique opportunity to play with filters that make your everyday pictures look like sceneries out of a fairytale and toy with the idea of calling yourself an amateur photographer which is in vogue these days, accept that there is no shame in crying or wanting to pour your heart out or seeking emotional help, accept that you need to stop wanting to be a hero or a heroine who is unbreakable. We are human after all and for us Indians (which even Europeans admittedly feel), we are used to feeling so much more emotionally bonded, it is completely understandable if we crave for just that here. What I am trying to say is, there is always something you can figure out to keep yourself standing.

Earlier, I had mentioned that while being in India we take a lot of things for granted. Now, will having learnt to appreciate what I had make me attend my phone calls or respond to messages when I am in India again? Actually no, chances are that I would still miss those calls because when I am back in a surrounding where my mind knows how to function intuitively and where I might probably get smothered emotionally, I would still be looking for those little avenues where I can be on my own and those little avenues will be welcome and seen as a blessing. You see, the differences in the Tess in Europe and the Tess in India also shows some of the downsides we have in our world too. And that is why it is important to have what Miley Cyrus musically says… “the best of both worlds”

Now please allow me to take your leave so that I can glare at my Czech friend who is back from spending three months in India. He just had the nerve to say “I cannot believe I am back in Czech! I want to go back to India. It is so strange here, no one talks to me on the streets”. I want to tell him that probably back in India people talked to him because of his white skin but I know I wouldn’t be fully right if I say so.

Namaste!