Over a weekend chat with Jason, a Goan-intellectual-soon-to-be-priest, we considered the possibility of meeting in Venice, where I have been assigned an apartment from the beginning of May until July 20 because of my ongoing mentorship work as part of the Ocean Space TBA 21 fellowship. We had spoken longingly about the idea of ‘domesticating’ Venice with our presence, being there not as tourists but with people with a shared Goan heritage. This meant we ‘got’ each other. We’d inadvertently always been somewhat European. Recently Jason shared an article, “When you think of the Renaissance, think of Nagasaki, Goa and Oaxaca,” to which he had been alerted by the scholar Ananya Jahanara Kabir. “For Goan readers of this article, which I really recommend, if you want to save Goa, and by extension Goan culture, you need to embrace the larger world, and the classical culture, from which it was born,” he wrote by way of introducing the article by Stuart M McManus, which, Jason felt, served to buttress his argument, that “we need to see Europe as not merely limited to the continent, but rather as produced in various locations—extracontinental Europes—which produced a new universal European Christendom—particularly in the Philippine context—even as an older Christendom was collapsing”.

Understandably, those who are still getting to know me in this, my present avatar as an immigrant wife, someone who is in Europe by virtue of marriage, mix up my place of origin. Since I brandish a Bombay-Goan identity, my ten years as a Delhi resident further complicates my narrative. To add to the confusion is the continual echo of my actual birthplace—Kuwait, where my father worked for some years, as did my mother, before returning to India around 1989 before the Gulf War. I carry so many histories of origin, so many different points of contact and exposure with me wherever I go, sometimes it feels like a whole universe, complete with its own galaxies, all tangentially connected to the people around me.

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Because all the homes that are not the home I am currently making in Tramin feel so far away in the aftermath of the Pandemic, they have become even more alive and animated. My body has become differently attuned as it practises forms of trickery—mental manipulations designed to both amplify and reduce the alienation. Home is the displaced tree I’m carrying like a cross, except with each step the hanging roots attach themselves to my path so that I am fixed and mobile at the same time.

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D’Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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