I grew up with the idea of one kind of one-way traffic. Good things mostly resided abroad and, occasionally, some of them came this way, to India, to Calcutta, to my home. Parents' friends, returning from abroad, brought gifts. Then my father went abroad for the first time and brought back stuff. When he opened the suitcase there was this smell, this aroma of phoren, this wonderful whiff of an unknown world on all the different things he had bought. I remember that I couldn't stop smelling the plastic box which had contained some Japanese cosmetics for my mother. For months I would come home from school, open the clear plastic lid with the Japanese letters embossed in clear gold and take a deep breath and this would make me very happy.
As I grew older, the surface aroma and the mystery of the packaging, and the cheaper textures and colours receded - without ever quite going away - but the utility and pleasure of imported things became ever more important. At fifteen, when I went to the West for the first time myself, I shopped as if I was never ever going to leave India again. Every single thing, every single greed, was weighed in the light of 'now or never'. As a result I came back with a strange collection of stationery, art materials and odd 'free' things such as menu-printed paper placemats from highway pancake houses in America.
Going to college in America in the late 70s began an object-oscillation that continues till today, a suitcase traffic of condiments, food items, clothes, stationery and art materials. Leaving Calcutta, I would have arguments with my mother about how much pickle to carry: I would only want to take as much as would be needed for a small stack of theplas (spicy Gujarati roti-parathas) whereas my mother would push me to take more, in case I could eat it with other things. The idea of mixing chhundo and achar with American food filled me with horror and I would refuse to carry extra; I suspect there was a need in me to compartmentalize everything, including homesickness.
Returning from the States, there was a clear list of basics: markers and assorted felt-pens, pads of art paper and tins of strong 'Italian' coffee to deploy with the moka coffee makers I had left at home from previous trips. Somehow, if I stopped in England or Europe on the way back, there wasn't much I wanted to bring back from there, every sense of desire and missing being focused on America, and especially New York.
In my late twenties, the area of interest shifted. I began to travel back and forth from London and the Atlantic grew bigger, shoving America further away. This was also when I finally began to develop an interest in different kinds of food and so there were no more arguments with my mother about how much pickle to carry - I would take as much as possible. On the return leg would be lugged back various cheeses, olive oil and, again, good coffee. With the shift in various economies and my own personal tastes came various realizations. For instance, in the early 80s, London was almost a dead zone for good coffee, whereas New York was replete with espresso joints and shops selling Italian and Puerto Rican blends of dark-roasted java. Similarly, you could get a much wider range of Italian and even French foods in New York than you did in London. By the early 90s this had changed completely - suddenly New York and other American cities were playing catch-up and London was growing into the food capital of the world.
These kinds of shifts would also be reflected in what my luggage contained, both on the outward journey and on the return leg. For instance, it soon became silly to be carrying any Indian spices or commercial pickles to the UK - you could get everything there, at a higher price, sure, but without the hernia-inducing, extra-weight-charge-attracting hauling of saman from India. With the great Manmohanization of India the business of bringing back jeans and various branded clothing items also reduced massively. With the advent of the internet, the huge cachet of music albums, whether on vinyl, cassettes or CDs, and films, whether on VHS or DVD, almost disappeared. What remained constant in my suitcase while returning were certain art materials, cheese, oil and coffee.
Across the last two decades, economic tectonics have shifted things even more. In the big Indian hangar of a grocery store near where I usually stay in north London, I find more Gujarati condiments and spices than I do in Bhawanipur or Jagubajar. Across the road, in the Bangladeshi stores, people of the piscatorial persuasion will find all sorts of Bengali fish (though, of course, typical Bongoplaints will be heard about the inferior taste of this or that Padma fish as compared to the Ganga variety) and, in season, all kinds of deltaic shaak such as pui, kolmi and laal. The Pakistani butchers adjacent will provide one with proper goat-meat, avoiding the pitfall of a lamb-ent taste in the 'mutton' curry. Added to all this is the cornucopia of Greek, Turkish and Middle Eastern foodings also available close by. Not very far from all this splendour sit the Ethiopian and Polish stores, inviting further mix-and-match culinary eclecticism, a lot of it quite affordable even.
Given this lay of the land you would think one's bidesh-bound suitcase would become quite light but that's not so easily achieved. This time, while packing to go to London for a couple of months, I found myself contemplating a strange thing - should I pack the coffee I'm used to drinking? India has always had some of the best coffee beans in the world, the problem has always been in how they are roasted. Now an excellent supplier, sitting in Gurgaon of all places, sends me two excellent varieties of beans, which I blend. The coffee I get is as good as anything one finds in London and far cheaper. Along with the coffee I also looked at the lovingly preserved container of liquid notun gur, the local brand of kashundi I like and, of course, some home-made pickles a friend's mother had given me. Moving away from food, I found myself weighing the heavy, rough hand-made paper from the Sabarmati Ashram that I've been working with recently, something you can't find for love or money in art stores abroad.
Suddenly, the absurdity of all this hit me. I felt I was one of those colonial idiots from another time who had the luxury of transporting their entire world in a canyon of trunks on a large slow ship. I castigated myself, remembering the nomads and hobos of yore, thinking of the wandering minstrels, the genuine gachhtola'r bauls. Following on this came another thought, a question about aging, and about not being able to do without the things and tastes one is used to. And finally came the realization that, actually, perhaps, it isn't the actual stuff, the things I have been transporting back and forth across the globe for almost forty years, but the game, the act of choosing and discarding, the whole ritual of making lists and strategizing how to pack my suitcase, and the brigand-smuggler's pleasure at having successfully manoeuvered the booty through various airlines and customs that is addictive. This logically led me to understand that for someone hardwired like me, the worst nightmare then would be two fully-equipped houses at two ends of the earth, and enough money to order in whatever I wanted, from wherever I wanted, whenever I wanted it. Perhaps, every time I pack my suitcase, or unpack it, I want to relive that heady moment when my parents opened my father's suitcase after he came back from his round-the-world trip.
