Somewhere Remote Within

Abstract

This piece explores the idea of discomfort in leisure. It is written from the point of view of a person of colour who has resided in many countries and is used to code-switching. It touches on the interplay of prejudice and privilege while on vacation, offering a nuanced entry into the tensions depicted on popular shows like The White Lotus.

For centuries, explorers have relied on the form of the travel journal. I have used the same format to document my reflections during a trip to Guadeloupe, with photos from my iPhone. The collection is a nod to the sociology of contemporary travel, particularly the gap between depictions on social media and reality on the ground. 

Keywords: Code-switching, travel, Guadeloupe, leisure

DAY 1: ROUTE DE LA TRAVERSÉE

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I turn off navigation as our Citroën slides into the jungle’s throat. I’ve memorized the rest, a serpentine drive along Route de la Traversée would bring us across the island. Then, a slight left.

The open sky we’d flown through an hour ago was now a band of twilight guiding us from above. My ears pop to light-footed chirps.

“I’ve never heard so many birds.”

“How many nested in there?”

“A hundred?… maybe thousands.”

Their soundscape transcends our internal instrumentation.

We slink through the forest, while it parades variegations of green – that is the paltry word we use to describe what we see. Green is not enough. Green can be vivid, waxy, dull, or dead. The belly of the tropics is green in that encompassing way.

We halt at a crossing. Rain has soaked the earth, extending the thicket’s reach. The smell of herb, clay, and earthy rot seeps into our car and unlocks something in me – a child of monsoon. He leans out the window to take photos, and in this brief solitude, scenes from my childhood in India come tumbling into the present.

Many lands have housed me over decades, patching together a mirage of home. The latest is Montréal. To a body accustomed to heat and scorch, Canada’s continental climate exerts itself like a spell. Every winter, my skin labels snow as a threat. An accumulation so silent, so tender, its sorcery goes unnoticed. It slows blood, numbing me from outside in. I’ve learnt to admire the fractal fingers of snowflakes. How they multiply the little light we are given. The way they speak the unadulterated language of the wild – coming down in inconsiderate, unwavering patterns. Snow has the gift of forever: to pile, disrupt, melt, and begin again.

Resistance to the cold is the unfinished seam of my integration. An amorphous discomfort compared to the  gnawing mechanics of job hunting or separating trash. In declaring this, I place myself among the fortunate on a continuum of newcomer experiences. I swim to opportunities with ease, sensing the laws of buoyancy at work. But I also know the nausea of new waters.

A house becomes home if you stay long enough. Time sculpts acceptance. This is how untenable weather turns into small talk. It is how liminal states congeal into identity. It was also with time that I came to recognize the universal longing winters can induce. My husband, no stranger to frost, also dreams of flying south on dreary days. And so, we find ourselves on this highway cutting across Guadeloupe, catching brushstrokes of sun on skin.

Day 2: FURSAT

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Our Airbnb is the site of countless animal dramas. I stretch in the dining room; a space defined by a wall and a cantilevered roof. Chairs and shelves stand inert among more wondrous sights. A severed lizard torso swarmed by ants, a tailless cat curled in shade, hummingbirds suspended in flight. We sip ourselves awake.

“How is it so calm, without an inch of stillness?”

The phone commands a twitch in his hand. It warns of an incoming snow storm back home. The diligent device is quickly turned face down. Frosted trees on scentless earth, and hibernating insects could wait latitudes away.

It takes an entire day for us to unwind. We acquaint ourselves with the property. Meander trees that sway from the weight of fruit. And practice their movements in hammocks.

In the evening, birds descend onto crumbs we’ve left behind. I send my mother their stop motion dance to delight her. She texts back using a word I haven’t mouthed in a while. Fursat, in Urdu, bundles concepts of affordance, space, and time. It paints in the subtleties of leisure: freedom from grating chores, an intermission expanding like lungs.

This one word captured the essence of our getaway. We sleep with door ajar to microscopic motion in the garden.

Day 3: BEACH BUM

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Plage de la Perle greets us with water folding in on itself. The sea is rough and gleaming, cupped by emerald hills. The heat takes me from deprivation to total exposure within minutes. With crowded eyes, I recall my discomfort on previous beach holidays.

It isn’t the beach so much, more this business of lying around in the sun. I do, of course, understand the body’s urge to relax where sand and water mingle; my adolescence unfurled along pristine beaches in Oman. To me, beaches are designed for strolls. A place to collect shells, catch a sunset, or swim before getting changed for a snack. The impulse to lounge in full sun – that too in strips of spandex – stands in contrast with these pleasures. Tanning, in particular, conjures the anxious sizzle of bacon in a pan.

The static gets overwhelming. Until it takes me by the hand and places me onto the barren field in school. The teacher used to line us up by height. A battalion of child shadows heaving under the Arabian sun. The girl behind me would run off with a nosebleed before the calisthenics even began. I still picture that molten air creeping up her nostril like a needle.

“Can you do my back?”

My husband sips his beer and flips over. He’s determined to leave with a tan.

I rub sunscreen as he points. He knows where pale skin needs extra protection. Later, he intuits the boundary beyond which beachwear is unacceptable. He teaches me how to catch a wave, why bonfires of driftwood are no good.

“How do you know all this?”

He shrugs.

North America coloured itself in while I lived in student residences. That’s when I first heard of seasonal customs like the fireplace channel or beach vacations. Facts gathered naturally: some beaches were meant for working out, some tolerated drinking, others permitted topless sun-bathing, others still were reserved for nudists.

I was always told to cover up at the beach. To avoid the sun, to change behind thatch or inside a circle described by towels. I can now pick out flecks of policing and colourism encrusted on that advice. And yet, I remain incapable of baring my body to the sun.

I drag my towel over to the palms. Park myself to read in the shade among babies, the cautious, and the peeling. When the heat dissipates, I join him in neck-deep water, the layers inside us bound by a continuous ocean.

Day 4: MONSTERA

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The hike marked for beginners is rather treacherous. He navigates, I keep up. The signs make no sense, but we are sure to escape the outer edge of the jungle at some point. It is, afterall, tamed for our enjoyment.

“I wouldn’t want to be here after dark.”

It is already evening under the canopy at noon. The lick of humidity halts us at every ascent. Great walls of chlorophyll encase my breathing. I look up at broad leaves slicing light and circle my eyes down to the forest floor.

“Look at this giant!”

The enormous fan of cellulose calls to mind its cousin in our bedroom back home. It was watered just before the airport taxi arrived. I’d poured profusely to apologize for our upcoming negligence.

I recall doing the same when it traveled with me from Toronto to Montréal. A friend had hastily planted a leaf cutting into soil. The frail plant sat on my lap at the airport and took the window seat on the plane. A silent passenger, rooted in his own suitcase. We flew east, emitting a blanket of carbon to be recycled by his kin.

I had been quite proud of keeping the sapling alive until now. But here, in its sticky home, I’m forced to consider how I’ve stunted its majesty. Croaks pull us down a rivulet until we spot two wooden signs nailed to a post in the distance: EXIT and LEAVE NO TRACE.

Day 5: MORNE-A-L'EAU

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Roosters wake us too early. Their annoying calls remind me of a television spurting the same jingles at every break.

“Their message has got to be moronic.”

“It’s like they keep having the same epiphany over and over again… I’m a rooster!”

We snicker at the decorated simpletons waddling under a clothesline. Dismissing the impenetrability of animal minds with casual cruelty.

In the afternoon we visit the cemetery of tiles. Little houses for ghosts running up a hillside. They watch over the rumpled town below. We talk and pose in its checkerboard lanes. Our laughter floats, a glitch in space, reflecting off orderly squares set for eternity.

The tombstones display unfamiliar names. I love spotting ones from a by-gone era, sitting among fresh flowers and trinkets. I fit them to a dog, baby, or character I might name someday. Bistoquet, Jasmin, Franquin, Alphonse, Narayaninsamy. My sunglasses come off.

I blink at the skewed spelling of an Indian name. A mustached man looks back at me from his thumb-sided frame. Other graves display names from the Indian subcontinent, including a prominent leader of the resistance. I photograph what I can to look up later. Then, we make our way out through a pile of defunct machinery surrounding the graveyard.

We drive an hour west to a sugar factory in the adjacent town. Habitation Zévallos is closed for the day. No explanation. Through the fence, we read the inscription in stone.

“L’histoire de la Guadeloupe est imprégnée du courage, de l’audace, de la détermination, de la foi, de l’abnégation et du sacrifice de ces travailleurs indiennes qui enracinent sur leur terre d’accueil la Philosophie, les Arts, et les traditions de L’inde millénaire.”

My fingers curl on chainlink. Our days were too limited to drive back here. The story I’d glimpsed would stay locked in that museum.

DAY 6: GRAND TERRE

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Our Citroën sputters and dies mid-slope. Its final grunt dredges up our more cavalier decisions: No data plan? An AirBnb so far into the jungle? Driving in a bikini? Our phones sit drained from an afternoon of capturing reflections in shallow water.

Fursat snaps and recoils like string under tension. The locals watch us from their balconies. My husband’s face hangs in apology as I wave cars through.

“Désolé! Go around!”

Mireille walks over. She’s in her early twenties and I notice immediately that there is a phone in her hand. Her brother maneuvers our car off the road by abandoning it to gravity and steering with his head torqued back.

Relieved to be out of the way, a new embarrassment takes hold of us. We have now become their problem. Mireille dials our rental company, the tow truck, the car assistance helpline. We sit in her veranda like children, spilling sand trapped in our bathing suits with each fidget. In addition to giving refuge to car-wrecked tourists, she exhibits a pious breed of patience. She calmly does our bidding, passing between a chain of operators.

The coo of babies comes from within. I babble, hoping to somehow compress the disruption we’ve dragged into their sparse house.
“I love Guadeloupe. It’s so lush and green! We don’t have this back home.”

She doesn’t ask where we are from. Just flashes a sweet smile and goes back to being on hold. He chimes in.

“C’est quoi ton coup de cœur ici?”

She giggles and points to the floor. Right here, her home. She’s lived here since she was born, and doesn’t think anywhere else could be better. Her gestures are humble and brief, interludes in the duty we’ve wedged into her afternoon.

It is decided that her brother ought to take us to the car rental before closing time on Friday. He hurtles us down the highway. His driving is maniacal, with the kind of disregard for rules that had us opting for longer, more scenic routes since arrival. I hang off the handle fixed above the window. Where all our safety nets had failed – car insurance, rental contracts, credit cards – this boy had stepped in to hold our weight. I drew my knees together, praying for a figure behind the counter upon arrival.

Hours later, we emerge from a lulled forest in our new car. We park just as the sun slips into its socket. Our instincts lead us to the pool, to replicate in our drifting bodies the sensation of kindness from strangers.

Day 7: SAUT DE ACOMAT

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I cut into the flesh of a mango. Nectar runs down my arm, sticky with crystalline forms dissolved within. Sugar introduces viscosity to whatever it comes in contact with. It has shaped the island we are on; inspiring greed, strata, power, the tangible and intangible.

He googles Guadeloupe under our mesh-canopied bed. We read through elaborate systems built around the saccharine: Plantocracies, Trading Companies, Free People of Colour, Le Code Noir.

“Slavery was abolished in 1848. Then came indentured labourers from Pondicherry.”

“So… they rebranded it by adding a limit to the hardship?”

The plinth outside the sugar factory made sense now. So did the graves with Indian names. I imagined being owned by the employer who had approved my vacation. Having to sleep where I work, being shipped around like property, the wicked spell cultivation can cast on the body of a labourer.

We make our way down a steep slope at dawn, following advice to see the waterfall before a crowd sets in. Conversation continues from the night before.

“We still have indentured labour. Like, the workers flown in to construct stadiums.”

“Or au-pairs. Some of them have to live with their employers.”

His words halt me. I was the kid with a live-in au pair. My parents flew her from a village in Gujarat to Muscat to look after us. She slept in a room in our house and never left, even on weekends. Her only escape was watching TV when we stepped out for a picnic. She sought permission even to call home.

At the falls I undo my pants and stuff them into our bag. I used to drop pajamas into two holes on the ground, only to find them folded in my closet within the hour. My brother and I would leave a trail of chaos and move to new areas of play. Our mess resolved by invisible hands, cleaning up behind us for years.

I dive into the emerald reservoir, wondering if she made good with the money earned from us.

Her figure, in various configurations of work, haunts me as we cycle through our holiday routine of swimming, sipping rum, snaking home at sunset. She’d found me mid-stride, with no place to set down the gnarled nest I’ve inherited.

The white noise of crickets comes to soothe my shapeless guilt at night. Drowning me into sun-soaked slumber.

Day 8: SCUBA DIVING

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Our diving coach acquaints us with the mysterious logic of water. Above the surface is the weight of preparation, choppy waves, tangled equipment. Underneath, is a world of soft and languid movement.

I sit on the edge of the boat. Its metal ridge digging into the underside of my thigh, much like the codes pressed into my mind. Places I’ve called home, other time zones, other ecologies, keep germinating inside me. Never to be washed off. I hush incongruities by focusing on the immediate and the perpetual.

My husband nods. I put my trust in gravity and flop backwards, awaiting his appearance underwater. We float like awkward zeppelins amid multi-coloured fish, holding up their traffic. Our bodies tilt and hover to get out of the way. Is it ever possible to come into contact with other worlds without imposing, altering, faltering?

We emerge from the depths on clumsy feet.

“Let’s stick around to catch our last sunset.”

As the sand coats my feet one last time, I lock eyes with tourists sprawled on chaise longues. Their resort has claimed a part of the beach by erecting a fence. But from where we are, they appear caged.

“That doesn’t look like much fun.”

The moon is out by the time we get packing. Clouds drift overhead, outlined in silver. We fold clothes amid pleasant agitations in the garden. The bin births a gecko at each opening to chuck our recycling.

Our vacation has blazed by. I stretch time on my last night, even as I look forward to my return. Perhaps I’m here just for the prick of being away. To fan desire before getting back to someplace less remote, more familiar.

During takeoff I spot mangroves dotting the northern crevice of the island. They stand strong, filtering silt with their dense roots. They accept the deep diversity moving through: insects, twigs, debris, plastic, prejudice, privilege – all held for a moment, before slipping forth.

About the Author

Prachi Khandekar is a Montréal-based curator, designer, and writer. She conceives and creates exhibitions and multimedia projects.

Her work examines our tech- and brand-driven culture, in particular the polarities of comfort and pain it offers: laughter, isolation, nostalgia, anxiety, and everything in between. She curates The Enigma of Objects, an instagram-based exhibition of crowd-sourced objects and micro-stories. Her exhibition Flight Mode, presented at Toronto’s Waterfront in 2019, was about the erosion of solitude due to increased connectivity. She is currently developing Circuits of Sand and Water, a work of immersive theater about a woman stuck between animal instincts and digital impulses in the era of AI.

She has studied Architecture and Psychology at the University of Toronto, Canada, and holds an M.A. in Design Criticism from the University of the Arts London, UK.  

Prachi has lived in India, Oman, Canada and the UK. These cultures / contexts continue to inform her work.

prachikhandekar.com

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