First published in Livemint & Wall Street Journal India;Thu, Dec 20 2012
My office
was closed for ten days over Christmas last year and only one question prevailed
in my mind... quo vadis?
Growing up
in India, the subcontinent was big enough for me to plan all my holidays to new
destinations. When I moved to London and Europe became accessible, I continued to succumb to the temptation
of that insatiable search for the new. Why return to a place when there were so
many others to explore?
But this time, manipulated a
little by West London’s aggressive promotion of staying with families during
the festive season, I was beginning to have doubts about whether I was
adventurous enough. It was evident that I was seeking something else;
perhaps a sort of travelling warmth that can only come with familiarity.
I couldn’t afford to go back to
India, so in an experiment to see if I could change the way I perceived travelling,
I decided to return to France, a place I had visited many times before. I would
start with the unknown (Lille), make my way towards the acquainted (Maisoncelles),
and end my journey and the year with the familiar (Paris).
Lille lies in the North of
France on the border with Belgium. Some miles from this brew of red bricked
buildings, boutique stores, Belgian beer and waffles, is a residential commune
called Croix, where I was hosted by my friend Marion in her family home. It was
in this sheltered, green, suburban paradise that we ate, drank, talked, slept
and didn’t do much else.
Marion had her extended family
over for Christmas and we had a special dinner every evening. On Christmas Eve,
as the fireplace crackled away, I was treated to a Swiss dish called raclette – the preparation of which was a
long drawn affair of melting cheese on an electric grill in little pans called coupelles and scraping off the melted
part onto potatoes and charcuterie.
My raclette companions consisted of Marion, her parents, sister, uncle
and her two ninety year old grandmothers. One of these grandmothers, over the
course of several decades, had perfected the only four words she could remember
in English and didn’t tire of saying them to me at the end of every round of cheese-melting
(there were many rounds). My Christmas
present was thus a ‘how do you do’ in an accent becoming of the Queen herself.
The other grandmother, fondly
referred to by the family as ‘Michael Jackson’ on account of her spunk, was dressed
in the shiniest of jackets and entertained me by telling me of her escapades on
the tram (something that had been forbidden by her son) in French-for-dummies,
a language the whole family stooped down to for my benefit. The raclette dinner was probably the longest
and most pleasurable meal I have ever experienced. The family seemed to have perfected a way of prioritizing the
things that were really worth spending time on. Like dinner.
Post Christmas, I took the train to Maisoncelles, a small
town near Le Mans, where my friends, Sheriden and Tiny lived in a house more
than a century old. They had redesigned the house to suit their tastes - even
the name of the house had been modified from Le Genièvre to the more philosophical Le
Zenièvre.
They had kept most of the interesting things from the past
like the bread oven and fireplace in the living room and had then created new
spaces around, like the converted attic that was my bedroom – a room with sloping
roofs, furnished with bookshelves all along the walls, a writer’s desk under
the a window and an armchair whose purpose seemed to be luring bibliophiles
with a comforting spot and then making it almost impossible for them to leave.
Downstairs, the fireplace was lit every night. The walnut
trees in the garden had supplied my hosts with a large produce and we cracked
fresh walnuts for all our salads. The larder was full of homemade jams, preserves
and supplies. My only real task - stretching the definition of task in every
way - was to feed a couple of ducks in the pond outside.
I spent the mornings going on long rambles in the
countryside. As I passed sign after sign announcing the names of large old farmhouses
in French – champs de la vigne, la hutte - I realized I was in an alien
world. This was a slow-moving world of family run farms and large woodlands. It
was so far from the people in London who were hurrying to get somewhere,
anywhere, all the time, this was so far from anything I had ever known.
It was difficult
to leave this zen-like existence, but the end of the year was upon me and it
was time to go to Paris.
On my
first visit to the city five years ago, I was fascinated by the co-existence of real people and
places with cultural landmarks that I had only heard or read about. On one hand there were original
paintings by Monet at the Musée d'Orsay,
and on the other, I could stare out of bus windows at fashionable old ladies, French
speaking children and young lovers lingering forever to exchange a kiss in the
squalor of a metro station.
With each visit to the city, the
gap between my two self-defined realms – the ornate, imagined Paris and the
real-life Paris – got smaller and smaller till one visit, exhausted of that
initial, cloudy headed fascination, I just did the things I would do anywhere.
My friend lived in the bizarre
campus of a university where all international students had been bundled up
into buildings that had been designed to resemble the architecture in their
home countries. After a close inspection of the most exotic buildings (Maison du Japon and Maison de la Grèce),
we indulged
ourselves in a second hand book shop that sold French children’s books.
We greeted the New
Year standing on top of Montmartre.
As we counted down, I was reminded of a New Year’s Eve spent some years ago on the same spot with my brother. Two teenagers seated on the stairs of the Sacré-CÅ“ur had switched on a radio just as the Dave Brubeck Quartet had reached that magnificent point in ‘Take Five’ when the improvisation ends and the song comes back to its original, instantly recognizable melody. As the crowd around me erupted, and I finished playing the same segment of the song in my head, I felt elated. I had seen a side of France that I had never quite managed to capture in my manic, checklist making frenzy. In seeking the familiar through the unfamiliar I had discovered a feeling so strong that I knew it would be a reference point I would remember and return to, like a great jazz song that you want to listen to again and again till you remember it so well that it plays in your head automatically, si tu veux.
As we counted down, I was reminded of a New Year’s Eve spent some years ago on the same spot with my brother. Two teenagers seated on the stairs of the Sacré-CÅ“ur had switched on a radio just as the Dave Brubeck Quartet had reached that magnificent point in ‘Take Five’ when the improvisation ends and the song comes back to its original, instantly recognizable melody. As the crowd around me erupted, and I finished playing the same segment of the song in my head, I felt elated. I had seen a side of France that I had never quite managed to capture in my manic, checklist making frenzy. In seeking the familiar through the unfamiliar I had discovered a feeling so strong that I knew it would be a reference point I would remember and return to, like a great jazz song that you want to listen to again and again till you remember it so well that it plays in your head automatically, si tu veux.
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