Excerpt: There was an odd comfort in being a stranger.
I have always lost my way, even in a city I’ve lived in for nearly twenty years. In days gone by, when I was a mere visitor to Chicago from Indiana, coming here meant being a tourist for the day or the week, always haplessly asking strangers, “Excuse me, which way is Michigan Avenue?”
In 1997, I finally decided to move to Chicago instead of simply being a visitor. When I started looking for apartments, I was told by friends who lived here that it would be easy for me to find my way because, as they said with a great deal of assurance, “Chicago is built on a grid.”
And yet, there I was, constantly lost as I tried to navigate this “grid,” which was nothing like the one in Manhattan, a place I was, at the time, far more familiar with and which fell neatly into a tangible grid-like pattern in my head as I roamed effortlessly around it. “This is no fucking grid,” I found myself screaming at an impervious wall that had cropped up from nowhere, it seemed, practically sneaking up on me on Ainslie, blocking my way as I angrily spun my wheels to find yet another apartment, furiously trying to make it to all my viewing appointments on time.
In Chicago, thoroughfares change names, they merge, they become other streets altogether.
When I moved here, I became less irritated with the non-grid-like griddiness of it all and finally decided that this was charming. Much like Calcutta, where I grew up and where I once argued for an entire afternoon with a friend about whether a street was named X or Y (it turned out that X simply became Y at some point), Chicago, I decided, had its own quirkiness.
And I reconciled myself to the fact that I am always someone who gets lost. I suspect that if I really wanted to, I could and would develop that ability that some people have, of instantly figuring out where they are. But I have, I will confess, always liked being lost, convinced that my lostness will result in new adventures, in places I’d never find otherwise.
The problem, of course, is that the drama of being lost includes never being able to find your way back to the place where you got lost and had those adventures. My heart still yearns for that fantastic taqueria that I wandered into one night in Logan Square, a hole in the wall with the best tacos and homemade salsa I’ve ever had.
Meanwhile, I remain lost. Even after all these many years, I still get off the el downtown bewildered and ask how to find my way around. On the train, I am that one person whom you see carefully and intently staring at the door on the wrong side, and then sheepishly moving around when the announcer voice tells you which one to exit from. Somehow, everyone else has these things memorised but even after nearly twenty years, I’ve failed to remember anything.
It was in that spirit I found myself outside an el station one early evening, to make myself to an event. This time I was armed with a printed set of instructions. What they didn’t tell me is that the street I got off on went one way, and that I had to walk to the next one over to get a bus going in the other direction. There’s an impervious quality to Chicago’s transportation system; it requires you to be a long-time resident of a neighbourhood, to simply know, as a matter of fact that, of course, the bus doesn’t actually go both directions on this two-way street, everyone knows you’re supposed to walk one block north to get to the bus going in the direction in which you need to move. My tiny brain, unable to process this new idea, simply went around in circles, and I helplessly bleated to anyone who would listen, “Excuse me, but can you tell me where I might find this bus?”
I approached two men walking by, asking them the same question. They stopped and looked at me politely and at each other and then one of them said to me, with a charming smile and a voice faint with a hint of elsewhere, “Sorry, but we do not know. We are strangers here.”
We are strangers here. With those words alone, he had proclaimed his strangeness, his stranger-ness for me, another foreigner. We are strangers here. We are as lost as you are.
Americans never use the word “strangers,” although “strange” is a word that often comes up.
We are strangers here. We are hungry and lost, please give us food in this new land.
We are strangers here. Please forgive us as we colonise your land, rape you, kill you and your children, and gift you these disease-laden blankets.
We are strangers here. But we will take your land.
Whenever I think about traveling, which I miss a lot, I think of becoming a stranger, something I long for after years of having become the not-stranger, the neighbour, the business patron, the familiar woman who walks down the street in a blue hat. When I learn or try to learn a new language or speak an old one again, I do so with some initial hesitation, knowing I will never actually sound French or Bengali or Spanish enough. But while others spend time attempting to blend in seamlessly, even going so far as to think in French, as one classmate did, I’m content with sounding like an Other.
Unlike some, I neither have — nor want — the ability to blend in with the natives. At times, depending on where I am, I’m identified as Latina, or Black, or “Arab,” that word which mostly means, You are an Absolute Other. Dark skin combined with terrorist hair, I drive frightened white women across the street. If I’d wanted to blend in, I would have changed a lot years ago, had my hair straightened, my legs waxed, my skin bleached, my clothes changed to a “professional” look, and my tongue carefully pronouncing the “r” at the end of “war.” But even all that, I suspect, would not have helped.
I like blundering into places not knowing what to expect, to be stared at. I spent my formative years in Indiana, driving into small towns and in restaurants where no one seemed to think it was rude to stare at this foreigner. There was an odd comfort in being a stranger. In places where the Ku Klux Klan still gathered every year on the steps of Town Hall, I knew the stares could mean a multiplicity of things.
As a child and an adolescent, I was constantly warned about not wandering around in “strange places,” with dark forebodings of what could happen to me if I went unaccompanied. I was not to leave the safety of home without an escort of some sort but as I walked or drove along with whoever was assigned to protect me, I mused about the irony of being told to feel safe in the very spaces where I faced the most threat, where I was the most likely to be met by the violence I was told lay outside.
The result is that even many years later, I have a tendency to walk into places and situations without thinking about danger, unanchored by any sense of safety that might serve as a contrast. It’s not that I’m brave, at all, but that I am guided by a certain kind of cluelessness. It’s not that I don’t watch my surroundings. As someone who walks everywhere and at sometimes odd times, I’ve learnt to avoid places and people based on what we like to call our sixth sense, which is really an accretion of our lived experience bubbling to the top of our consciousness as we move into unfamiliar surroundings. The group of people at a table staring at me do so in the full light of day, and I’m comfortable eating and, sometimes, chatting with them. The man walking by and pretending not to see me, pretending not to take stock is the one who causes me to cross the street. The implied question from those who stare openly, Who is this stranger? is less threatening than the one never said out loud by the one who wants to harm me: I’m going to pretend I don’t see you as a stranger. I’m going to pretend to make you safe.
When Toby, my Best Beloved Cat, was still alive, I fantasised about the two of us travelling. His sudden death, sudden only to me but not my friends who sadly saw the end coming, meant that I had misjudged that a sixteen-year-old cat could probably not make it with me to the ends of the world. For years, I saw myself showing up in a dark inn, in Cornwall, perhaps: My cat and I are strangers here. May we have shelter? A drink? A room?
There is this romance about the stranger, in Westerns. The stranger is either the evil guy or the not-evil guy and sometimes there is more than one. No one, it seems, based on my recollections of being forced to watch many Westerns as a child, is actually good; they all have murky pasts. In the detective series Midsomer Murders, set in quaint, bucolic English towns, John Barnaby takes over as Chief Inspector Detective from his cousin Tom. As he makes his way to a new case, a woman who doesn’t know of his relationship to the former CID remarks, without irony, that it was a good thing to see John go because, after all, he had been a stranger, having only moved there twenty years ago: “Well, he was never really one of us, was he? Twenty years. You barely get acquainted.”
We are strangers here.
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