Trying to belong

Pope John Paul died, so god here is my letter with that, just like how mummy and papa used to send letters to Bombay whenever they found anyone going to any part of India. And it really dint matter who, most often it was the contractor's second site engineers' foreman's room-mate or a vagueness of a connection of the sort. But everytime there was a 'sanghaat', (very polite word in guj for a courier boy), there would be atleast a round of 50 letters to be sent by the 'x' of so to the 'y' of the other. And it was a way of communication. Who knows tomorrow you might meet someone on the street who had carried your letter through someone's someone's someone, some 16 years ago, and there would take birth a new acquaintance - now friendship. It was in those times, their own way of expanding circles, the old age chat rooms. Of course the stories of how one telephone call back to the hometown used to be a monthly ritual, and how it would take nearly two hours to be able to make it for your turn, and how that meeting place had become more of a ritual than the phone call itself, etc. are all fascinating stories of how my small little world was being born amidst new connections. It is these small things, I think, about that place that make it a home for me. That give me a desire to now belong there. To give back to it what it has given to me (how patriotic!, but not really that).

But anyways the point being that in times like those choice was not a factor. You needed company to survive, and it really dint matter how much the person understood your taste in music or enjoyed long drives over movies on weekends or any other such deciding interests. Desperate times did call for deperate measures, and surprisingly some of the best friendships developed simply because they were backed by time. And in a time like that when the whole city was in phases of unsettling, no one really cared for how bare they were being, stooping down for help, or how inconsiderate they might sound taking up several of the 20 kilos, that a poor guy is allotted while traveling, sending mithai's and dresses and packages and letters. When you knew u weren't heading home for a long long time, it is the least you could do to keep memories alive. And it was mutual, the 'poor guy' too understood it was just his lucky day today.
Sometimes when people accuse the land where I come from, for being so materialistic and pompous and pseudo, it kills me. And I often wondered why, maybe because it is not this object that just grew out of nowhere. To me I have my own history in it. And a very colorful, eventful one. I have seen some part of this land grow with me and no matter that the 'public' face of this town may speak one language, most people who could now be termed locals, don't! For them it is still home and the connections are still real and when they interact, they don't do it to create an event or begin a spectacle, it is still done all in a singular idea of sharing times. Of breaking from routine over chai on a rainy evening, or barbecuing in someone's back yard because your boss sucks and you want to bitch! It is as simple as that.

Public-ness within a city, is not the face where the people interact, it is the face that the city projects for imagined interactions. And even as I build my own ideology, I cannot build your experience, but I can build the city's aspiration to imagine you interacted.
This interaction can comprise all that the city aspires you to re-live or all that the mediator understands as representational, but yet the million histories that already belong and are being born even as I write, cannot be imagined by just a singular me or by the datas and records of generalisation. Then I must understand the one history that I am building for. And the more and more I think about it, the more and more redundant the question seems. If i build for a singular history, that will not remain public anymore. And to build for a collective, is still making it a minority. So, where does the act of constructing belong? Simply in being mediator? A facilitator for the movements of some other? i thought there was more power to my building than that!

If publicness is really just a face of the city, like history is, and politics is, and everything else is, why is it so contested? Is it because it seems easiest to belong everything in the public domain, but it is the toughest to get that public domain to interact? Maybe so, but then how does just a single appropriation answer that question , when experience is termed to be so varied.

It is tough in these times, when the pope is no more, I am losing my sense of belonging now without a dictative force :? !