In Search of Silence

by Poorna Bell

  Her experience is held as a template for transformation that will burn through unhappiness, and I think there is a danger in relying on something other than yourself to fix what’s wrong, or the belief that something will swoop out of the murk to make sense of all the chaos.

  Plus, I wasn’t travelling to find myself; I was travelling to get lost in myself. ‘Well, write that,’ Nicki said.

  The first self you are given is often taken for granted, the making of you formed when memory wasn’t yours to command yet.

  It is built from the thoughts and actions of everyone you’ve encountered so far, including your parents, your experience at school, your friends, and your journey into adulthood. It is all your first times. Its construction was so long ago, you’ve forgotten what it is made of.

  But when the earthquake has come, and you are forced to rebuild from the rubble, your second self is more awake, aware, careful.

  I made a heart from what was left of the remnants, and what other people gave to me in love, willingly. I made a body from running and lifting weights because it was the only thing that gave me respite. I made a soul from the love and sadness Rob left me with, and the strength I earned just by agreeing to be in the world every day.

  My mind took the longest. At first, I protected it by doing only what I felt capable of. I reduced every action and thought to its simplest form: eat, sleep, breathe. And when it was ready, I looked at its shattered fragments and I looked at the person I wanted to be, and in the quiet of my own home, I stitched together the parts of myself that had survived the fire of my grief. Stronger, vaster, more complicated and resolute.

  It is not transformation through pasta and preaching; it’s the transformation of wolves. Piercing the silence of your loss is the crack and break of sinew and bone, it is the river of blood that flows around all of the blasted remains of your former self, because you are changing all of yourself to become something altogether more powerful, more truthful.

  I arrived at this point because I went to that precipice of life and death every day, where my mind was torn apart and put together every day. No one said, ‘Hey, champ, take some time off from navigating the alleyways of insanity and reality.’ I did it while buying milk from Tesco, signing off an invoice, going to people’s birthdays.

  This trip wasn’t a gimmick. It wasn’t about travelling the world in a kayak I made myself or staying with Finnish ice carvers.

  Each of these places would have to mean something. So Italy and Thailand wouldn’t make the final cut because they just seemed like nice places for a holiday.

  When I sat down to draw up a plan of where to go, India was at the top of this list.

  There was no point me going to Peru, for instance, because there are no other versions of me in Peru. I didn’t cycle into a foot-high pile of cow dung there (true story), or drop heart-shaped notes on a boy’s head. I didn’t cry behind its trees or learn about how awful girls could be to each other. I didn’t learn how to cook or become afraid of heights there.

  To a certain extent, figuring my stuff out means looking at the type of person I used to be, looking at the person I am, and working out what needs to change, and what needs to stay the same.

  I’ve long since realised – especially in matters of India – that there is a distorted perception of what it’s like as a place versus the reality. You arrive expecting exaltation; you leave feeling hot and sweaty, feeling like you don’t quite get it, but everyone else got it, so maybe there’s something wrong with you.

  Or you are fully suckered by the travel reviews. There have been plenty of times I’ve gone to some ‘must-see little place that serves the best meat curry’ to find it’s literally a tin-pot, dime-a-dozen shack, or braved the heat to see the flower market with its ‘dazzling colours’.

  Five minutes in, you’ve seen one marigold, you’ve seen them all. Flies settle on your skin. There is a child tugging at your trousers. You’re getting hot and sweaty. One day it will turn into an anecdote you tell your friends about ‘crazy India’.

  India is so much bigger than that. She has vast deserts where the dreams of camels roll across the dunes. Her seas are beautiful and wild, and she snacks on swimmers who underestimate her terrible and quiet fury.

  Her mangroves flow across the lips of riverbanks and spread into a tangle of leaves and roots, hiding tigers and crocodiles within their folds. Her eyes look out from languid pools framed in the twist of forests; her back is the snowy arch of the Himalayas. She has silence within her, but it gets lost in noise because that makes for a more interesting travel feature.

  Although India is a place I usually visit to hang out with my relatives and get drunk on beer, I felt she was an important place to visit. She was my past, but she was also my future. In order to figure out the mechanics of myself, I needed to do that within her landscape, because there was a part of the old me from before Rob died who was still locked away there and hadn’t yet grieved or made her peace with the loss and this new person she was becoming.

  Nepal seemed like an obvious choice because her mountains were unlike any other in the world: austere beauty met with warm and friendly people.

  New Zealand was a contender because she had already begun her siren call. She thumped her fist at me from beneath the seabed, she crooked her finger and pointed towards her corridors of mountains and glacial lakes. I frequently saw her in my dreams. Never Rob, only her.

  New Zealand and India also meant fulfilling a promise to myself: to spend more time with my parents and Rob’s parents. None of us wanted to say it, but they were all getting older, and I didn’t want our relationship to cruise on the autopilot setting we have reserved for our parents.

  After visiting those three places, maybe I would be more at peace with being home in Britain. I didn’t expect to fix my sadness, but I wanted to create an inner reservoir of calm and quiet that I could draw on whenever I was in need.

  What was this about? It was about belonging. But not the belonging of a hermit crab; I wasn’t looking for pieces of another person’s shell to stick to my own.

  What was this about? It was about love. But not about love that rescues; I was trying to honour the relationships I had and trying to survive the most important one I had lost.

  What was this about? It was about strength. But not strength from an invisible saviour, strength that originated within myself and came from the people already in my life.

  What was this about? It was about expectations. But working out the ones other people have of me, the ones I have of myself, and the ones I want to work towards meeting.

  What is this about? Well, let’s begin.

  5

  LOVE, BUT NOT AS YOU KNOW IT

  There’s a period of dead time, between your old life and your new one, where you are thinking WHAT THE FUCK HAVE I JUST DONE?

  Especially if you have done something foolhardy like try to save money by temporarily moving back in with your parents. My rationale was that as I’d be leaving mid-month in September, there was no point paying for a full month of my mortgage.

  ‘Hang on,’ Mal said when I called her up, lying on the floor in my bedroom like I did back when I was fifteen to discuss boys, Silverchair and The Note Brooke Passed In Maths. ‘Haven’t you only been there five days?’

  ‘What kind of best friend are you?’ I replied. ‘It feels like it’s been FIVE YEARS.’

  To get to my parents’ house, you drive along the M25 and turn off into country lanes, along tarmac pressed at the feet of trees and hedges until these shadowed avenues of leaf and branch open into fields of rapeseed, igniting the landscape in a blaze of yellow.

  When I was a child, I itched to escape this place. I looked at the fields and saw only their borders. I wanted noise because the silence was deafening. I tried all manner of tiny and pathetic rebellions: smoking cigarettes in cornfields (I got bitten by ants); my first tattoo (at a place called Kev’s Tattoo Parlour, which had a beaded curtain instead of a door); and my first
kiss aged fourteen with an older metalhead boy named Mark (he had long curly hair and kissed like the Facehugger from Alien).

  As far as South Asian parents went, mine were pretty liberal. As a kid, I was never going to have the freedom of my white friends, who were allowed to roam the high street at all hours.

  But I went to sleepovers, dressed how I wanted and went to gigs up in London despite the concept of a gig being utterly foreign to my parents because they had both grown up in India. Not once did they say, ‘We’re not sure about this Marilyn Manson chap and his dodgy eyeball.’ They never told me what to study, or who to become.

  The natural order of the parent–child bond is that you all love each other unconditionally, but you, as the child, don’t make a huge amount of effort with your parents. If you’re middle-class and comfortable in your love, you visit them on the weekends, expect to be fed like royalty and then you slob on their sofa until it’s time to go.

  Maybe this is how it would have been. But our bond deepened and strengthened because of what I went through with Rob. When he was alive, there was a lot I didn’t tell them – specifically about his addiction – and when he died, I was in their home the day I got the phone call.

  They had been there unconditionally, and even when they must have wanted to ask a thousand questions, they didn’t pressure me with it. After he passed away, I didn’t want to live with all of the secrets that had burdened my life for so long.

  Once I confessed what had happened, they didn’t judge me, and they didn’t – despite my deepest concerns – annihilate Rob’s memory. It sounds so silly, but I was so scared that we wouldn’t be allowed to talk about him. Instead, they hugged me, gave me understanding, and that moment remains the time I have felt most loved by them.

  We have a good relationship because we’ve had to work at it.

  I was finding it challenging being back in their house, but it wasn’t because of anything they did. Mum was adorable and kept trying to feed me, while Dad the resident bartender was always game for a glass of wine – ‘It’s five o’clock somewhere’ being the motto on the family crest. It was more about the cognitive dissonance being created by my life choice.

  Everyone kept saying, ‘Oh, my God, is it amazing that you’ve left work?’, but it’s not like the rewards instantly kicked in. You don’t dance around like Maria in The Sound of Music, and actually, if you did, it indicates you had a fucked-up and dysfunctional relationship with your job. It wasn’t always perfect, but I loved my job.

  Rather, it was the transition from one state to another, and what didn’t help was that, mixed in with all this doubt of ‘What Have I Done?’, I had unwittingly moved to a place where I instantly regressed – because that’s what you do when you’re in your parents’ home. It fed into this feeling that I’d made a bad choice and was going backwards, not forwards.

  If an edifice could be a metaphor for my emotional turmoil, it would be the New Ash Green Shopping Centre, an awful collection of buildings built on an architectural blueprint of mediocrity, tucked away in the middle of nowhere.

  In the decades my parents lived in the area, I had never heard of this place, yet mysteriously it was only a five-minute drive from their house. Clearly it had been clinging to the underskirt of their life like an unwanted mushroom.

  ‘Come on!’ my mum said. ‘I must have told you about it.’

  ‘Nope,’ I said adamantly. ‘Trust me, I definitely would’ve remembered this festering shithole.’

  I had only stumbled across it because I was looking for a cheap gym near their house. But there was something oppressive about it, a certain funk, as if everything had been placed here and left to rot like an egg and cress sandwich stuck behind a radiator.

  There was a bakery that sold bright-pink iced buns and unfulfilled ambitions. An estate agent touting new beginnings alongside tired homes trapped inside pebbledash. A defunct bank with wooden planks nailed over the doors and windows. A charity shop selling Katie Price books, polyester knitwear and a dead grandma’s crystal set. A tanning salon with a solitary receptionist who was the colour of Fanta.

  The gym was possibly the worst I had ever been to. It wasn’t even that the weights of the dumbbells were written on them in Tippex, but the clientele made me think, ‘Holy crap, is this my peer group now?’

  Two scrawny students with hair gel and Lycra man leggings. One middle-aged man in a moustache wearing 1970s running shorts. Five old ladies in varying shades of pastel leisurewear. One guy around my age who looked so sad I was certain he was going to start weeping on the Leg Curl.

  I hyperventilated, bought an iced bun and sat in my car. Everything I owned was now in storage, and I had reduced myself to living out of a suitcase for the foreseeable future. Soon, even the car I was sitting in was due to be sold. Was I going to end up like these people, weeping in a forgotten wasteland filled with bad tans and frustrated lives?

  I punched the button on the car sound system. Srini Pillay, whose podcast episode I kept listening to on repeat, reassured me through the airwaves that feeling uncomfortable in your new choices was normal. That the brain was going to do everything it could to sabotage me.

  All you need to do is keep going, because if you look back, your brain will want to go back to what it knows best, so that it doesn’t feel squirmy and uncomfortable.

  One thing that seemed to help was, rather than focusing on what could go wrong, I could start thinking about what I wanted to come out of it. I wanted to come back to England with a firmer sense of what I wanted and needed from life. However messy it got, that was the goal. I also wanted to see if this pressure I felt existed in other places, or whether it was a London thing.

  I wanted to see whether I was placing limitations on myself, or whether it was a product of my environment.

  Srini Pillay spoke about the illusion of freedom – which is where we tell ourselves that we could be free if only we made different choices. But what we don’t account for is the fact that we create our own prisons because we are scared by the idea of freedom and its unpredictability.

  Just before I left, I picked up some freelance work with my old company, and, by serendipity, I found myself chatting to Puja McClymont, a life coach, for a feature about flexible working. We just happened to be talking about different perspectives, and inspiration struck: ‘Do you think the whole quitting-your-job-to-go-travelling thing is a myth and that the answers are closer to home?’ I asked without going into detail or that I was asking for myself. ‘Do people actually learn something from it?’

  She paused and said, ‘[After travelling] . . . you value life more. When you are working in an urban environment, everything is taken for granted and you are working pay cheque to pay cheque. You go into this monetary focus rather than a lifestyle focus. And you lose perception and a grasp of what is real, and what your values are.

  ‘I’ve been in situations where I’ve asked clients what they value most in the world and they struggle. And those answers – whether it’s family, a hobby, good health – they should come naturally. If people are challenged by that question, it’s because they are doing for doing’s sake.

  ‘Remove yourself from that environment, and I think you will live a better life when you come back.’

  Either way, in a few days, I was going to be in Bangalore, a city I called my second home, and my life in London as I knew it, for a time, was over.

  I was going to try to experience everything with an open heart and mind.

  ‘You should get her married off to someone,’ my mother’s friend Jamal tells her when I’m not in earshot, on a pleasantly warm October evening in Bangalore.

  It’s only been two days since I left England for my three-month stint in India, but already Jamal is messing with my Om Shanti Om, let’s-be-a-dandelion-in-the-wind ethos.

  Mum passes the information on to me after he has left, when she’s certain he’s too far away for me to go hunt him down with a baseball bat.

  I don’t think Jam
al is a terrible person, but there are so many things I want to say to this man – to educate him, ask him questions – but I am already defeated by the time I reach halfway into my argument.

  A person like this is always going to think a man is my solution. A person like this, who doesn’t live any kind of life I want, doesn’t deserve the arrangement of my words or a chastisement.

  What does he know of the love in my life after Rob left it? Does he know that this trip with my parents is a form of love, a commitment we are making to each other to create memories, to learn more about each other?

  Before I met Rob, I thought that a romantic love was the most important love of all. We prioritise it over every other type of love. I suppose it’s because, on a primal level, in heterosexual relationships, a union of that type is a means to an end: to have kids.

  I also felt it was a right. Pre-Rob, I firmly believed that everyone had a someone waiting out there for them, the right sock to their left one, the other turtle dove, the perfect match. I also heavily believed in fate and destiny, and I visited people who read tarot cards and coffee grounds who assured me this would happen.

  (All of this stuff, by the way, was placed in a psychological bin and torched with a flamethrower after Rob died.)

  When I met Rob, I thought that this was the universe finally paying up. Most people who go through trauma go Full God or discover some sort of genuine spirituality or, like me, realise there is no fucking rhyme or reason to the universe – bad things happen, good things happen, the end.

  What this means in a post-Rob world is that I’ve come to realise that our lives are built upon a shore of so many different types of love. Maybe I didn’t quite appreciate them all before, my family and friends. Maybe I took a lot of them for granted. But when that tsunami came and washed me out to sea, they were there, waiting for me to return to them.