A foreigner in Boston

It’s been over a month here in Boston since I began the new chapter of my life. Right from the moment, when I was peeping down to have a look of blue Massachusetts Bay from my plane’s window to now, I have felt puzzled, amazed, stupefied, and complete silence. It’s like the scene from Harry Potter book-

“Seventeen silver Sickles to a Galleon and twenty- nine Knuts to a Sickle”, Hagrid said to awestruck Harry. “See, Harry, I told you. It’s easy enough!”

This past month I have been playing around, and learning to find how things work here and I find it’s not that easy. At least for me. I have tried to learn to answer “How you doing?” spontaneously when asked, “How you doing?”. However, since I don’t expect random people to greet me when I am walking on street, I am too slow more often than not and then I just manage to put a fake smile to acknowledge their greeting.

While I am trying to rhyme my can’t with ant, and learning to say bell-pepper (capsicum), eggplant (brinjal) and trashcan (dustbin),  I have to stop myself really hard from running to every Indian I spot on the street. Whenever they see my eager eyes, they consider me for a moment before pulling over their unfriendly mask of I-don’t-know-you. I start hiding my craving for everything that is Indian, and let my instinct become visible only when I am relishing pakoda  while I am reading Jhumpa Lahri’s Sexy (set in Boston) in the private confines of my kitchen. I count the number of American jokes which I have understood and the ones which I have laughed at the right time, and I convince myself that I am doing a decent job. It seems that I have began blending in with the heterogeneous crowd, being less conspicuous in the sea of diversity and finally adapting to my new life in Boston.

However, this all pretense gets tossed to the wind, whenever I wake up in the morning, and I find myself lying down on a mattress in an half-empty room. Everything around me is familiarly strange.  I find my eyes on the same level as the white pair of shoes kept on the floor. “No, I can’t be sleeping on the floor!” For a moment, I forget how I end up being in that room. The reality evades my consciousness. “It’s my new home, idiot!” I frantically look for my smart phone so as to call up someone. I can’t find it. It’s not surprising, I must have kicked it during my sleep. Then in an attempt to calm myself down, I convince myself that it’s just a strange dream, and then my mind says, “Only with one difference. Unlike others, this won’t end”, and with that, I fell into the endless trap that mind plays with you often. The girl whom I kissed yesterday night comes flooding back, and I get lost into her fragrance. I have got the stupid smile on my face as I keep staring into something beautiful from my nostalgic past. It takes me longer than a moment to break the trance. The azure sky with white patches of cloud visible from my window reminds vaguely of a day which I have spent playing cricket with my friends in my childhood. The view comforts me a little and everything starts seeming normal.

And just then the American red squirrel stares at me amusingly from the tree outside my window, and sniffs something foreign in air.

Posted by Mohit on October 4, 2015

https://provokedme.wordpress.com/2015/10/04/a-foreigner-in-boston/