I could've been a different person

It had been a few hectic weeks of moving about and here I was, finally, drinking fennel chai to feel better. It struck me that I was sitting facing a balcony door and all around me was quiet. It was really really pleasant. The kind of quiet and pleasant that heals you. There was space around me and emptiness. But there were chairs to sit on and a table to put my cup on. There was a cute dining table where I could sit and have dinner. I was still sitting facing the balcony door and now the only difference was that the balcony door was open and there was so much breeze. It made me even happier, like a Sims character that was suddenly discovering interactions with every object in the house and gaining happiness points for it. What might not be apparent to anyone reading is how my happiness is tinged in great part due to my own changed relationship with material objects over years of staying in hostel dorm rooms, shared rooms but especially in the past four years, when I've have had my own apartment so to speak for at least a few months at a stretch. The last four years have also marked intense periods of precarity, of living in hotel rooms for months and more recently, just not having a home at all. Of course, all of this is marked by the kindness of strangers and friends, their willingness to let me stay put an extra week even after the monthly rental dates have passed. It is against that kind of a wash, a sea of constant change washing over me that I found myself sitting facing the balcony, more amused with every passing second at the incoming breeze, the affordance of all this breeze and nowhere to go. I casually gazed around in disbelief and relief. And my gaze rested on the dusty ukelele under the table. It's hard to really start describing where these self-imposed beliefs materialized and just settled as if they were mine, as if I cultivated them as my own personality traits or beliefs. But a person like me would not know what to do with the ukelele. Almost suddenly out of a half instinct of someone who has never touched, nay, who has never dared touch a ukelele, not in the market in Hawai'i, not in a music shop, not been in the house of someone who casually has a ukelele or a piano or a guitar lying around, with the half instinct and the full baggage of a persona whose habitus has never had access to a ukelele, I grabbed it. I knew what I was going to do, I was going to cluelessly strum it. I had, in the past, cluelessly strummed at a guitar somewhere and pretend-played a piano in a harmless setting somewhere. Almost immediately I had realized that I was not one of those who would live to tell the story of how they were meant to be playing music. The second that followed was the stark reminder of my painful days with the harmonium. I fucking hated it. I had no idea what it would take to start instinctively playing a tune. Who was going to ever teach me how to just play any tune that you want to? And if it could not be taught then was my first encounter also supposed to be the simultaneous painful realization that I had just met an object, nay, a world, that I do not belong to? I am being slightly dramatic but in the moment that I grabbed and strummed at the ukelele in an empty house, I was reminded of something else.
I was reminded of the times when I had heard young parents of young children talk at length about cultivating habits. They said habits but you might as well say habitus. Crudely summed, habitus is a concept that French philosopher Pierre Bourdieu has written at length about, and it refers to a kind of second nature, the kind of practice, a way of being in the world, one's preferences of food, clothes, brands and just living that are actually very complex sedimentations of one's upbringing in a certain class, gender, caste, region  -- environment really. The kinds where for some, a guitar of an uncle or a set of oil crayons as birthday gifts or a well-stocked library - these make for entire future possibilities of who people turn out to be. Isn't it amazing? I could've been an entirely different person had my mother forced me to continue with the karate classes or, had my father been obsessed with collecting music cassettes. But this isn't an account of regret. On the contrary, I laughed self-mockingly because after a few minutes of strumming, my nagging instinct took over. I needed to write about it (haha!) and I had notebooks. I knew where to find my notebook and arrange for a pen but I finally settled on just typing it out on the computer. And voila, I was back to my habitus. I literally grew up with a computer. But this isn't even a post about my upbringing.
This whole little episode is about materials, that I have been looking at and thinking a little more deliberately about in the past few weeks at least. I have always been very inspired by those who write about material cultures and objects - wires and tables and mugs and cables. And my little journey from the room to the ukelele to the notebook was really about that. I had once very adamantly and defensively asserted to someone that I don't buy books. I genuinely couldn't afford to buy books then and nothing in my upbringing had made me an insider to the lettered world. I have come a long way, I feel at ease with books now and references aren't lost in me. But that has entirely been my own journey and for a young person who will grow around me, I will be that person who gives them a library to grow with. I oscillated for a while between the books and the ukelele, I had just yesterday read on someone's dating profile, a musician's dating profile. I had also often spoken of the world of possibilities that one must feel when one can play an instrument. You can play it anywhere, it's not a book. It doesn't get over. You can always do more and new and you don't need anyone. I guess by the time I am done writing this, one could argue that being able to write isn't finite either. I just wrote this whole thing up :)