The Indian Surgeon in Exile
Like all exiles, I hold within me a secret grief, that I have come to love my exile. This exile becomes the underlying bedrock of a sense of suffering that I have to recognize as a form of love, of my imagined country and a distant, mythical home that is always at sunset; where the sound of the everyday is an orchestra of divine music.
What the exiled will never admit to is the familiar comfort of meaning that exile brings them. The secret guilt of the exiled is that their exile is their liberation. I know this guilt only too well because it is in this exile that I have become a surgeon and this exile from India is the soil on which the garden of my existence grows.
As life goes on, this exile fades into the background, like a grey sky past a closed window, separate from the warmth of this apartment where I write this. It becomes an object of an abstract curiosity, easily forgotten.
The duty of those exiled is to forever remember their exile. It spares us the heartbreak of the wave of turmoil in moments of vulnerability, because a grey, overcast sky is a sign of thunder, except that this thunder illuminates the emptiness that should be occupied by the thousand things that are our own from birth: our faith, our languages, and the reconciliation of knowing that you are home.
Much as I would like to forget my own exile, to trade the comforts of home for this life is a price I have willingly paid, because the secret guilt of a meaningful life built brick by brick is no longer a shameful vice, but an altar to the life I had always wanted. This exile, painfully tearing through my soul, is the price I pay for a meaningful life.
I write this missive seated at a low coffee table, after a week-long engagement of work that has tested my limits, but I find comfort in knowing that my exile is not spent in servitude to a sentimental longing for what was once mine, but now belongs to the ether of the wider world.