Walking, Then Finding Home
Only after I began walking with some regularity, when it became a habit, did I notice the man who, for a while, became my fellow walker. This happened just before the world went quiet. When everyone retreated indoors or ventured out fretfully as a dreadful virus sneaked into our midst and left behind sorrows of every kind.
The summer before all this had been the best in years. It had been warm, with occasional, never inconvenient rain, and every tree was leafy, full with birds whose names I would learn months later, in the time of the long shutdown. It was as that time of great quiet stretched, as a strange stillness came over our small town and the world around, a stillness that stretched for months, then a year, did I also realize that the man, my fellow walker, was no longer around.
***
We had moved to this small town in north New Jersey five springs earlier. The snow still lay damp then, and soft in places, the mud clumps showing up like a man’s bald pate. This would be another temporary home, I told myself, and so I tried to condition myself to not feel attached to the place.
For that matter, it wasn’t houses I liked, but cities. I missed the feel of the narrow crowded, zigzagging road that led up to the apartment block in Bandra, a Bombay suburb, where we once lived. The sea was close, and I came to love the tiled sidewalk just by it, no matter the smell of seaweed and the sand-locked stale seawater.
I had liked the apartment in Delhi, too, especially when the peacocks appeared, feathers unfurled, on the terrace of an old villa next door. And through a gap, between more high-rises, one saw the flyover — what Americans call an overpass — where cars came sweeping down at all hours, in the manner of an amusement park fast ride. At any moment, it seemed, a car would turn turtle, then fall into the immensity of space. Cities let you imagine; a house hemmed you in.
***
In New Jersey, that first year my life was directed by habit. My daughter’s school, other necessary errands, the many impromptu things that crept up on weekends, framed the hours, and the minutes I devoted to my own writing, and reading. When I was on my own, I would look up often from my window on the second floor, and through the full-grown, majestic maple tree I could see the lake, shaped like a perfect circle, and half fenced in with the fountain in its middle. Everyone else called it a pond, for it was small for a lake. Besides, the fountain was manmade. But to me, it was a lake. A lake suggested timelessness.
In winter, when the leaves on the maple tree went bare, the world around me had a frozen look. The lake turned a shimmering silver white color. The lake, the tiled houses across it, shut for the winter, reminded me of a Brueghel painting: Winter Landscape, painted by both father and son who shared the same name.
I spent long minutes looking out at the frozen lake, thin ice-lines drawn on its face, waiting for the deer that came to it, walking scratchily through the long grass growing in the nearby woods, the brown geese that descended and circled in the icy puddle of water at the center before flapping away, their honking cries like a farewell. And sometimes I would wait for the mangy yellow-brown fox I had seen once, or even the bears, though their visits were rarer.
That first year, standing at the window, I watched the lake changing with every season. The lake, and the fountain, its waters rising in a fizz, and falling, time and again. The fountain operated every spring, summer, and fall. In winter, just before the lake froze to a steel gray, the fountain closed up, too. The grass around the lake was a mellow green in the summer, and a scrunchy ragged looking carpet in winter. This change imparted a certain rhythm and orderliness to my life, and when I understood this, I loved the lake unconditionally. An unforced love where I could take my own time.
The quiet world by the lake slowly offered itself to me. I noticed the birds then, blue jays, blue and white speckled titmice, the red breasted cardinals, the grackles, and the sparrows.
In summers I would hear a scythe at work, its snipping, swishing, and cutting sound. That sound became the sound of summers I wanted never to forget. A sound that brought back memories of past summers when I had been alone, in a similar way, and we lived in a house by the river in eastern India, and I would hear the washermen call from far away, or the fishermen in their small boats.
I remembered the summers in other paintings by Pieter Bruegel, the father, the one with no ‘h’ in his name. It was a summer, too — though it was far warmer in India, in the towns I grew up in — when I first turned the pages of my father’s books, those brought out by the New York based Time Life Art publishers.
My father paid for these in installments, meticulously keeping accounts in his thin black pocket diaries. My schoolmates had no idea about the books I read then, nor did they care. Such books were not part of the school syllabus and reading them never helped me get good marks. And while I wasn’t an accomplished student, I was transfixed by the paintings in these books that showed lost forgotten worlds and places far away. Long after I had closed the book, I could hear the sounds of the children playing in Bruegel’s painting, like a distant joyful humming in my head.
***
I don’t remember exactly when I began walking out on my own in my New Jersey neighborhood. One day, and then another, I took the lane and went past identical looking townhomes, crossing the smaller linden, holly, and dogwood trees growing on every side, smiling diffidently at neighbors sitting out on their porches or driveways. My low brimmed cotton hat hid half my face. I remember my uncertainty, the fearful way I looked at my feet, the way my feet led me, as I took one step and then another, my laces trailing on the ground at times. I felt the earth’s slow claiming of me, the way it calmed me, un-hostilely, helping me make of this place a home, one I came to love. A home in whose quietness I would find the other homes I had left behind.
***
It became a habit soon after. I walked all through the spring and summer, and even in the freezing months of winter. I found I was happy being out on my own alone, hearing only the sound of my steps, the calling of birds, as I went down Conklin Road and back again.
It must have been days, even weeks later that I began noticing my fellow walker. I must have passed him many times before when I drove my daughter to school and back, but now I began running into him with some regularity. He had been coming up the narrow sidewalk that meandered like a small stream along Conklin Drive or taking the turn from Church Road into River Road.
He was out walking in every season, no matter the weather. I knew he had been a walker long before I became one. And one early winter I came to recognize him from afar. His yellow jacket and sunglasses gave him a certain grimness. He had an almost military stride and was often talking to someone on his phone. I noticed the earbuds. Recognizing him, with his familiar stride, from a distance, somehow cheered me up. Or maybe it was the yellow he wore.
After a while, he began raising a hand in acknowledgement whenever we passed. He had fair square hands, very practical hands. We began nodding to each other.
The first time he spoke to me was the time I met him at my garage door. He was evidently returning from his walk, taking the last turn that led to his own home, and I was about to set out. It was early afternoon, the sun felt gentle, and feathery clouds bobbed in the blue sky. He stopped and complimented me on my smart sense of timing. Earlier it had rained suddenly and had left him drenched. He pointed to some damp patches on his yellow loose t-shirt.
I remember all this because those days I hardly spoke with anyone.
He spoke to me again months later. About the pace at which I walked. His voice was deep, in a pleasant way, and he spoke a very studied kind of English. My own way of talking to people was quick and nervous. I was not used to being noticed and was surprised he had bothered to talk to me.
You embarrassed me, I remember him telling me. I saw you step up with so much ease up the hilly road, and he pointed toward Conklin Drive to our right. The road and the community around had been dug up and built around a hill, part of other small hills that surrounded this small town. The town lay in a small bowl nestled by those hills, and sometimes, depending on the direction you faced or were walking in, the wind could be strong. I loved the whooshing sound it made against my ears, making me hold onto my hat in embarrassment. One winter, our very first in this town, it snowed heavily, and our bowl-shaped town collected a record amount of snow and made it to the national papers. The garden furniture out in the patio collected a lot of snow, and the table looked like a tall, round Christmas cake by the time the snowstorm ended.
The hills rose especially high to the north of town, the Pyramid Peak being its tallest point. To the south flowed the Rockaway River. To the west were the low ranging Knoll Hills, and the Passaic River to the east. The town, on Google maps, appeared diamond-shaped. I loved how on early winter mornings, I would see the late-rising sun emerge from the hill in front of me as I drove down the undulating decline of Horseneck Road.
***
This habit of walking was slowly formed, but one I found hard to give up. I became a familiar sight, and people I met randomly at the store in the next town, a few miles away, and others who occasionally stopped to talk to me, pointed this out. Maybe I wanted that. To be as much a part of the town, just as the town had seeped into me.
I had never been able to belong to a place like this, become part of it so seamlessly and easily.
When we lived in Maryland some years ago, I would hesitate every time I had to walk outside on my own. I was self-conscious, wary of how people looked at me and sized me up. Did they see me as an unwanted immigrant, someone fresh off the boat? I would be moved, even touched by the way the checkout girls at every store wished me ‘have a nice day’ – they were so polite, so perfunctory, so good at what they did.
There was the time I had walked out to a lake, some distance away, only to realize I was the only different looking person amid others busy with their sleek kayaks, canoes, and small yachts juddering when anchored. Someone raised a hand in a casual wave and I automatically felt more noticed. At a 7-11, I remembered the startled surprise on the faces of two other customers, both elderly and white, when I walked in with my daughter. Their stares pierced me, and the kindness of the barista made me almost teary.
Before I had to go anywhere, there were a hundred ways I prepped myself. The route, the possible people I would encounter, if I was dressed right, the way I would be looked at, whether the gathering would be diverse — I liked places to have all kinds of people among whom I could blend in, where nothing about me, not even my accent, would draw attention.
***
This fear, this wariness, had seeped into me over the years as I moved from place to place. Moving was a perennial feature of my growing up years. Everywhere I had lived before, walking had never been a spontaneous act, but always a necessary chore.
In the small town in eastern India where I spent my adolescent years, every road to school was haunted by the “eve-teasers.” Young men in flared pants, with wavy hair bobbing behind their ears, who leered and jeered at, followed and, at times, assaulted girls with impunity.
Every morning on my way to school, I prayed for no eve-teaser to materialize as I traveled in a rickshaw, for him not to glide alongside me on his bike, seemingly innocuous, not drawing anyone’s attention but viciously enjoying the fear on my face. Before going anywhere, even with my family, I worried about crowded roads, and too many eve-teasers. They were always around, and there were always more of them near the women’s colleges or the cinema halls.
Those days my father feared for me, as every parent did for their daughters. Fear made my father take precautions. An orderly would follow me on my rickshaw, always riding steadily behind on his bicycle.
Once when I was eleven, I walked, in a fit of pique, all the way to school. I knew the road well by then. It was like a half-square, so having left home I walked past the rickshaw-pullers colony, down the narrow lane encroached by old houses so overbuilt that it was always perpetually dark and then I took the right to the snake-like longer road that led past the cultural center, the women’s college, tuntil the iron-grilled school gate appeared before me.
It had taken me about fifteen minutes and father later said I had been lucky, not to be troubled in any way. He insisted that I promise never to do such a thing again. I remember my stubbornness in refusing to make this promise. I refused to live in fear, yet my father’s nagging anxiety about the eve-teasers had transferred to me.
As a police officer, he always had at hand the town’s crime statistics. He knew how the number of crimes like rape and assault rose week after week, month after month. But the police never took the eve-teasers seriously, certainly not enough to lodge them in the city’s only jail. They were only having harmless fun, the reasoning went. Or that the girls had behaved indecently, had dressed badly and drawn attention to themselves.
Only I knew how my heart had thudded that morning as I walked to school. I held my arms forward so they pressed against my breasts awkwardly. The eve-teasers were known to slink toward an unwary girl and molest her, before melting away into the crowds on their cycles. Secretly I was glad the orderly was behind me, slow cycling some meters away. I had but to shout, to raise an alarm in case the eve-teasers appeared. But ‘good girls’ were told never to shout or raise their voices.
Some years later, when we lived in another town, for my father’s transferrable job took us to different places every few years, I cycled down an old road, trying to imprint in my mind forever the journey I made to school every day and back. The road was uneven, making me jerk and bounce often on my cycle.
I skirted a sudden dip in the road where the pebbles gave way to dry sand, and marked the place where I had once fallen to my eternal ignominy. There was no orderly behind me this time as I took a turn past another local school, then the “talkies” showing the latest hit film, and then crossed the traffic circle. Last, I went up the quiet, gently forested Brooks Hill, past the old houses, the radio station and reached the spot where I could look down at my school for as long as I wanted, committing the yellow rectangular school block to memory, the bicycle shed where my own cycle had nestled with others, the playground farther away, and in one corner, just where the fenced wall began, there was the tree I had planted.
It was a young sapling and in a few years’ time it would grow tall and graceful like any Ashoka tree, a plant local to South Asia. This town became a home of sorts simply because I had planted a tree there.
I should write about the time years later when I walked home at night, all by myself with no one around for miles. We lived then in Singapore, and whenever I tell my friends this, they laugh or roll their eyes. There are “eyes” everywhere in that place, cameras keep you safe, they say. But they don’t get it. For it was the first time I had walked with no trace of self-consciousness, without my heart thudding fast with worry, without even looking over my shoulder once.
I had gotten off the train, taken the wavy, and well lit small road that led home, feeling only a song in my heart. Somewhere I knew unnamable trees grew close, and now invisible. Everything else looked neon and purple, and the sky, too, seemed absent or faraway, dispersed by the city’s lights. But I felt alone, free, and unafraid, despite being seen by a hundred and more closed circuit cameras.
***
Last year, we planted a tree by our New Jersey house, after a hurricane tore down the tree that had once stood there. I still feel the shadow of that old tree every time I walk past, and I talk to this young tree, surreptitiously, trying not to be noticed. Once it was as tall as I am, now it looms over me, leaning over me in a gentle wind. Trees really grow fast.
The more I walked in this small town with the rolling hills all around it, the more it became home. I would take one route for several days, and then choose a different one, quite randomly.
For instance, I have taken the road that goes along the pumpkin farm, down the river, past the cemetery until it reaches the street leading to the middle school. I stop often to read the names on the gravestones. One day I came across a stone marker commemorating the time George Washington had taken this same route with his armies during the Revolutionary War. On cold foggy days, the low trees and tall grass turn into shimmering figures from a time long ago. I felt these ghosts as benign, gentle presences from the past.
I have watched clouds appear slowly over the hill, taking on various shapes, and then moving away quickly. I remember how the evening the sky was at its most beautiful as I came down Horseneck Road, a zigzag, up and down road. The blueness stretched away for miles, into the universe, and the sun fell gently on every tiled roof.
My sighting of my fellow walker was part of all this.
The time I saw him getting into his car was just as news broke of the pandemic. I, or anyone else, had no idea then of the disruption about to happen, the long separations, the sudden departures, and the grief.
I have tried to remember that moment because it became the last time I saw him. It was then I made myself remember every detail of the other times I had met him.
It was still cold, for the winter had lingered. Are you going somewhere in this weather? That is what I thought I said, but I smiled instead.
“I am off then for a holiday. Take care, my dear.”
It was the way he said it. Offhand but still with warmth. I think now that I imagined it, the last bit when he tossed in that endearment. There was something in that sweet, quiet evening, the towering sky over us, and even the trees were like old friends.
A few days later, when I didn’t see him out walking, I looked for him on Facebook, and LinkedIn; I randomly googled him. I felt guilty, told myself I was just being curious. I learned he had been in this town for much longer than I had.
Sometime later, in another season, in a weird kind of coincidence, I discovered he was from Ukraine. Carol, who lives a few houses away from me, told me this.
“It’s a pity there’s a war on. I wondered what Michael would have said.” Somehow Carol assumed I knew who she was talking about. The old don’t have much time for thinking through such preliminaries.
Carol is a painter, and she just turned eighty. Her husband, Paul, was once a lawyer fighting civil rights cases in New York. Carol’s an everyday walker like me, no matter the weather. In winter, she’s always bundled up, bent over with her coat, a belt bag bouncing around her waist, and she lifts two fingers high in a wave whenever she spots me.
There’s this other man out on his walks, always too early in the morning, in a long blue coat and a red beanie. I see him waiting to cross the road as I approach, driving my daughter to school. He gestures with his hands that I must drive on, not stop for him.
Then the blonde woman, ponytail jogging with her every step, a gentle smile on her face no matter the crazy speed with which cars whizz past her.
The couple I meet walking down every small road in the neighborhood. The man locked into his earbuds walks with hands behind his back. His big-hipped wife sways as she walks, yet she gamely carries on. I am part of this silent community of walkers.
My first fellow walker: I’ve not seen him still, as I walk every day through my small town, down different roads, up one hill, then down another, past shops, and small offices.
I walk a lot, sometimes down Main Street with its old opera house and the model clay dogs displayed every summer. Or I take the steep roads of old Boonton, with their sweeping inclines and sudden declines, and the car workshops stretching along an entire part. I haven’t seen him again. But I especially love the walks early in the mornings, no matter the season. In the gray sunrise and or in the misty morning of winter, when I encounter my other fellow walkers. Shadowy, hooded figures lost in their thoughts. People I have to come to recognize well.
Yet we leave each other alone, understanding our need for solitude, caught in the togetherness of early morning. We feel as one amid the hazy lamplights, the quiet unbending trees, the houses huddled together, and only when we are near do we raise a hand in greeting and walk on.
I might see my first fellow walker again. Or I feel he could be among the walkers I pass every day, and that I am not sure. It seems nothing can ever change — not too drastically anyway — with this small world that I have come to love, hesitatingly. Like any home, I would love it no matter what happened, what shape or turn it took.
Someday, some years later, someone else will join us as a walker and think of me as an old-timer just as I did my fellow walker, whom I’ve never seen again.