Soul baring

In 1998, it had been close to a year since I graduated from an American university and was on a temporary work permit (EAD, I believe it was called) that was soon coming to an end. It was a year of severe recession and companies were folding like a card house in a hurricane. My bank balance was at a minimum, and I had not imbibed the “live on credit” spirit of the country I was living in and I had to return to my own country, with my tail between my legs, utterly defeated and lost.

I remember that phase today because I heard from a distant cousin I stayed with during that period. She and her husband graciously took me in and let me stay for two months while I wound up my life in the US to return to my homeland. Her husband was a natural counsellor, and he would talk to me every night after dinner, for hours, to make me understand that my going back was not a sign of failure but an opportunity to start afresh, and that “everything happens for good”. Their son, who was 10 at that time, was like a little brother to me; we’d roughhouse in the basement, I’d help him with his homework, take him to movies and buy him pokemon cards – the three of them saved me from falling off the deep end.

Today, she wrote to me after years because she was cleaning her basement, and found a certificate of a course I had completed while I was staying with them . She sent me a photo of the certificate and said it took her down memory lane, to the time I lived there. I was briefly disoriented and it took me a fraction of a moment back in time, to her house.

But it set me thinking on another track as well. Life is always full of ups and downs, I have noticed that every two-three years, there is some down in my life which would pass in a few months. But there have only been two occasions where the downs were really deep trenches that seemed impossible to crawl out of. One was those last months in the US, and the other is now. It seems almost providential that this cousin writes to me, when I am in the exact same mental state that I was back then at their house.

The last trench lasted nearly two years. After I came back to India, I struggled financially because my father was also broke, and I worked in a crappy publishing firm and hated every minute of it, until I got a break and after that there has been no looking back. Any problem that came after that were temporary – even my beloved grandmother’s death – and not as intense as those two years were.

I remember the feeling of “will this never pass?” in 1998-99, and I have the same feeling now. It will, I know, but god, I am exhausted – the bone crushing exhaustion of worry is the same as 23 years back. But I am glad my cousin wrote, for it reminds me of what kept me going then – everything happens for good.