There's No Place Like Home

I haven't even left the apartment today except for a quick run for fruit, milk, yogurt, broccoli, and avocadoes (all my basic food groups). I talked on the phone to friends. I dug through the mail and threw out most of it, did the laundry, unpacked. I gazed at my dumpy belly and dumpy thighs in the mirror and observed that I've put on a few pounds, dammit. But most of all, again and again, I twirled around my quiet little place, savoring the beauty and the comfort of it. This is where everything is exactly where I left it, where all my favorite books and pictures live, where all the furniture is smooshy and comfortable, where the bed has a Kendall-size indentation in it, where there is music and silence, where there is a rattle of streetcars and a whoosh of tires on wet city streets, where there are distant train whistles and a very nearby tea kettle, and where I am no trouble to anybody on earth.

The book I took with me on the trip, and loved every page of, is Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss. I meant to leave it behind, but I had to bring it home to read again, to hold to my heart, to underline and to quote from. One of my favorite passages is this, describing a fond older gay man worried about a young girl in love with the wrong boy: "He felt a flash of jealousy as do friends when they lose another to love, especially those who have understood that friendship is enough, steadier, healthier, easier on the heart. Something that always added and never took away." Amen. I join in that hymn to friendship. That, and "...the sick sweet rotting mulch of the human heart." She writes sentences and phrases like that on every page. I listened to a BBC interview with Desai and learned that it took her eight years to write it. Her mother, Anita Desai, is of course a fine novelist, and I learned that her father, Ashvin Desai, wrote in his 70s his first novel and signed a contract for it to be published just before he died. Hooray for late-bloomers. Gives me hope. Had it taken her twenty years to write this novel, it would have been worth it. If I can ever write one or two sentences as wonderful as the ones with which she peppers this book, and if I can ever write cogently about half the issues of great importance to her and to me (starting with love, loss, exile, immigration, home, power, and fragmented families), I will be pleased with myself.

I say that, but it's a lie. A few sentences will never be enough for me. Such is my greed and my hubris that I would like to write not one but maybe two novels with at least some bits as wonderful as Kiran Desai's, Arundhati Roy's, Sylvia Townsend Warner's, Barbara Kingsolver's, Jeannette Winterson's...and the list goes on. I would like to do for others what they have done for me. Meanwhile, I have not caught up with comments. I start to, and then I get distracted. So I will just see how it goes.