Routes Home

Robert Wood

My ancestral place, to use a local phrase, is Puthucurichy in Thiruvananthapuram district in Kerala in south-west India. It is a fishing village that sits on a strip of land between backwater and ocean. My grandparents were from there, and their parents before that, and their parents before that, all the way back to when Parasurama threw his axe into the water and it rose up to return to him creating the place itself. My grandparents left and had my mother in Singapore, and she left and had me in Boorloo when it was known as Perth. My family then, and myself, have always been located in the East Indian Ocean, back to a time before we called it that; and, while I have travelled far and wide, I have always returned home to a western coast, including to my birthplace on Noongar Country, from where I now write.

I did not always feel like I belonged here though. I had internalised ideas about power and privilege and identity, had gone searching in metropoles only to learn I was peripheral, and yet, there was also a sense of guilt, of shame at having displaced and stolen and settled. To do the work now, to find the middle path, to chart a course that is better for all, means that our balance is where the feet stand; on sand watching the waves lap over and over again, knowing of course that the British Empire will be washed away when the time comes to restore our homes.

I grew up swimming and fishing and diving for lobster and abalone, going prawning nearby, and sitting on the beach, counting grains and watching the gulls fly. I watched the sun set into the water and came up for air when the stars shone above us and the moon lit the path along the way. It was a sense of belonging to the tide, of how the water rose up and refreshed one in the shadows as we went on, no matter what happened in politics or culture or religion. To make sense of this was to make sense of rocks; it was a geologic reality, a time that was deeper than chest high, that one could drown in.

We left from there too, sailed onwards and backwards, to places where we ate stingrays wrapped in banana leaves, where there were cakes layered in millimetres till they reached a child’s height, to where family sat talking and watching the rain fall down in curtains to streets where there were paper boats floating all the way to the coast, just nearby, just within reach of where our belonging was made.

We left from there again, swum homewards, to a deeper truth, to where we climbed coconut trees and watched them bring in fish from the sea, each day rolling into the next, while the well filled up and was drawn from, where the rice was red as the flowers, and, somehow, we could time ourselves by the roosters that crowed and the pace was slow and luxurious, like white clouds.

I forgot about all this for a time, forgot about the ocean altogether, impossible as that sounds. Forgot about my body here, there, at home, in the journey of building a mind, of being swayed by the breeze that blew from cities far away. I went to do a doctorate in history in Philadelphia, but after completing my masters I decided to leave. I spent the final six months going through the motions at school and turning abandoned lots into community gardens, planting peaches and paw paws and mangoes, chasing the taste of home. When my visa expired, I was at a loss for where to go. I did not feel ready to return here to the Indian Ocean, so I went to Paris having internalised the popular middle class myth that this was where Culture lived. I had the vague idea of becoming a writer but did not know where to start. It started, as it always does, in the ocean and the ancestors who first came ashore.

My days in Paris took on a certain routine - writing in the morning and walking in the afternoon. Every day I would go through Montparnasse Cemetery and visit the graves of famous writers - Beckett, de Beauvoir, Sartre, Camus, and, my personal favourite, Caesar Vallejo. I got to know the city through its dead, which is a lot of it, from gardens to streets to museums to galleries to whole districts. After several weeks there and feeling as though I should not outstay my welcome, I went to my aunt and uncle in Berlin. I had forgotten what it was to be a saltwater person as others had tried to tell me I was a colonial in the capital. I needed to reconnect to the imagination, through family, through fish curry and polichattu, through chapatis and putu. I could find Puthucurichy so far from itself too, maybe even a little Singapore and Boorloo.

My mother’s sister had married a German man, which meant I would have to do this in Berlin, away from the coast. I shuttled back and forth across that city, spending my mornings reading Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations in high modernist comfort, and my evenings drinking cheap beer and eating cheap kebabs in the East. We went on excursions together sometimes - to pick cherries on the outskirts of town, to walk through the Bauhaus Museum, to visit Hegel’s grave and eat soup at a nearby cafe. Once, when my aunt was out of town, my uncle and I ate a very large number of oysters and drank champagne until the neighbours complained that we were being too loud on a Tuesday. That was twelve years ago now, but I remember it well remember it like swell. Coming home meant coming back to myself.

Now, in this moment, when there is a global pandemic and flights and freight are all delayed, it takes a certain amount of good fortune and stubbornness to simply live at home. The ocean allows us to do that, allows us to find the consolations of being stranded or stuck or malnourished in our souls. It is not without that edge of threat, the violence that comes naturally, but even this can seem to make the heart pulse stronger when the world is going south. For me, that has also meant continuing to grow into my origins that came here too, back to this city, via other coasts.

Journals like this one come from the ocean, which we know about from words and books and elders as well. They matter for more than their text. They matter to the homes they are part of, to the lives they inform, to the readers that pass by these words. A journal is an intimate and beautiful reality that offers comfort in a time of trouble. To me, it is nothing short of a blessing that Portside Review is for and from the Indian Ocean, which makes me feel at home. It is a repatriation that I am thankful for. That we collect in order to reflect also means that there is less distance than we think there is between each other and those ports that stretch around the world and make it flow back to Puthucurichy and all the other native places themselves. That thought alone makes me truly grateful in a world as fragile as ours and that is what we hope to share with you now.