Packing up an old home into boxes. Heat of Bombay in May—impossible. Sweat everywhere. Sticky nostalgic and sad, the scene—not poetic or sexy. Sound of that stupid fan, an old creaky man. Over and over and useless like a…
This piece came to me on a metro ride to my good friend’s home, in my home city of Bombay. I had been thinking a lot about endings—a lot of being a twenty-something in a metro city means saying goodbye to a loved one every month, as they leave to start new lives elsewhere. The piece came almost in one big breath, a reaction to that ache, and it felt so special or significant as it was arriving.
A few months before, I had moved back to Bombay after studying in Canada. I had also packed up my childhood home here in Mumbai, and was constantly circling the idea of how many lives we create through each choice, each turn, each word. Certain objects seemed to carry that unbearable weight—conduits for nostalgia that are sweet, simplistic, stupid, and yet so deep and rounded.
I went back to the feeling of that room. The room I grew up in, fell in love in. I thought about nostalgia’s closeness to cliché, and suddenly I had the tonality of my piece. The staccato sentences mirrored the stop-startness of being a teenager, of being introduced for the first time to feelings larger than yourself. The imagery evoked the visceral force of memory, especially when it attacks you in vignettes or slideshows.
Packing up a childhood home makes you aware of the brain’s attachment to tropes, especially when it comes to explaining or living or working through nostalgia—so I leaned into it. I wanted this piece to sound, feel, and inhabit the inside of a cliché: sickly sweet, uncomfortable, warm. Unafraid to be young. When I felt like the piece had captured that, I wanted to take it further, to treat nostalgia as an infectant. That’s when the closing image came to me—on that same metro ride—and made me laugh out loud.
TRISHA DHAR MALIK is a queer writer based in Mumbai, India. With a combined honours in English and creative writing from Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, she is now back home in Mumbai, navigating what it means to be twenty-four and know nothing. You can find her drinking a beverage and dreaming and writing in and around her city, and on Instagram @whereoceansmeet.
