Dipika Kohli
By Dipika Kohli
It’s fifteen to eight and the mood is of a specific sort of bustle, which is the kind you see on the south side of Phnom Penh’s at morning traffic rush. It’s not too much noise like the relentless moto honks in Ho Chi Minh City, nor too little, like if you were to spend a couple of days away from the capital over in, say, Battambang or Kampot.
I’m on a side street, at a place I come almost every day at this hour. Across the street is a school that’s got big yellow walls, kids idling about in front of it, a broken bench that no one ever sits on, and a bicycle repairman who sets up his shop every day, except holidays, on the corner. He helped me fix my bicycle about a week ago, when I decided to try it again. That’s because the rainy season has ended. Cooler weather. (This used to be tourist season, by the old, pre-Covid metrics.)
It’s a good time of the morning to come, before the next batch of regulars. They meet friends, they talk for a long time or hang out with phones, like in the old days when people used to read the papers in public squares around the world before Internet was always on, and always on everywhere. Maybe part of the reason I wound up in Cambodia was because there was, at the time when I first showed up, a slower pace that made me enjoy a particular mode of being, a feeling like it was completely normal to enjoy slowness. Not be rushed, not be busy for the sake of being busy, not getting lost in ‘productivity.’ Just being. It was a good feeling, being here. It still is.
It felt like I could really slow down, and I have, and I did, and I’m a little surprised ten years have gone by, but I’m also well aware I’m not the only one who shares this same story. I have been asked often why I chose not to stay ‘in your country’ but honestly, when you look at how the cards have fallen since 2014, and you’ve been outside of the borders since then, something shifts, internally. You’re not wanting to go there. It’s not ‘yours.’ The longer I’m away, the more I see it. What Thomas Wolfe meant, when he wrote You Can’t Go Home Again.
Personally, I like ‘third places’, which are neither home, nor work. They serve a need for inclusion, welcome, and comfort. I like this.
I like it a lot. To sit in the morning, with tea, getting comfortable with a piece of paper and a pencil and making a mark on a page. Or rereading things that I will have written in earlier moments when the mood struck. In this way, I understand better what it is that makes me who I am becoming. It’s not who am I, in this phase of this journey. Not anymore. It’s who am I going to be, next.
Here feels good. It’s okay to simply stop in, sit down, and not say anything, because someone will know, ‘That’s the person who comes here all the time. Give her the discount. Give her the nice teacups.’ I’ve made a few friends out of acquaintances who do what I do, coming here. We watch the street. At this hour the bicycle repairman is putting up his great tarps, and getting ready for a wave of people who need to get things stitched up to get going. There’s no franticness; everyone gets a turn.
This is how it’s come to happen. This is how I’m ambiently part of the community, here where I am right now. So, over time, you shift from one place to begin to belong to another. You become known. Perhaps elsewhere, you will have been forgotten. You let go. You move forward. I think those of us who have been gone too far for too long can relate to each other when someone brings it up. The plain fact that there is no ‘back’ to go ‘home’ to. Remember the last scene of the third movie of Lord of the Rings?
The truth is, I’m still on the road. But, parked for a bit, I’m also home.
If you’re not a new reader of this magazine, you may know that the last time I wrote for Saathee was at the beginning of the pandemic. “Kismuth & the Way” sort of went on a long tour, inward, reflecting and going, ‘What the’. A lot. Circumstances being as they were, I wound up staying in Vietnam for twenty months. Waiting, mostly, for the pandemic to ‘end.’
So here I am. I relax a lot, but today is also a relaxing day. Just being here now, in this awakening city. Maybe readers of this magazine can relate. What’s fascinating to me is that I can now finally understand ‘the look.’ It’s the look that I’ve seen often that members of a diaspora get, when they will talk about it and open up and share and will become misty-eyed and sing the praises of ‘home.’
To quote the Irish singer/songwriter Christy Moore:
In the City of Chicago
As the evening shadows fall
There are people dreaming
Of the hills of Donegal
Maybe it was Ireland where the pubs were the third places. In Ireland I got to know ‘the craic,’ the music, the food, the gatherings, the people who are the funniest in the world, the landscapes of green and greener, and the oceans of southwest County Cork. Three years there. I think it was way back then, the first time going abroad for an extended time, that I felt this was right, for me. To unlearn the too-fast things. What’s changed now? I like what I like, that’s the same, but now, I know what I like, too.
“Good morning, Dipika.”
“Well, hello. How are you? Ah, that’s good to hear she’s okay, now. And, good morning to you, too.”
Tea and a bit of craic, Cambodia-style, too.
Dipika Kohli is an author who is based in Phnom Penh. Discover her books at kismuth.com and other projects at dipikakohli.com.
