memory

I remember standing in the middle of a waste field, four years ago. All around me were large hills, pocked with the green of tea bushes and the black of the Nuwara Eliya earth. In front of me were two community heads, two panchayat heads and their coteries, all male, all wearing sarongs that they had untied from their hips, in deference to the sole female present. I was tired, and exhausted after 10 hours of bone jarring driving and walking up and down these hills and dirt roads. Finally, we had found some land, that someone was willing to donate to build our school. The details of who, and why escape me now. All i remember that day was that the sun was setting, and the hills were casting shadows, and I was there, mediating between too panchayat heads for the land fell squarely between two districts, and both were squabbling over whose jurisdiction the school would fall under. Land title, money (from school fees), power. And me, parachuted in from so far away, yet never ever feeling anywhere else, as though I was absolutely finally at home. And then a phone call came, from as far away as New York I believe, and the connection crackled and jumped, but I heard a voice which to me then, was also home. And I spoke about where I was and what I was doing, a million miles away from the starched world of crisp Pink shirts and heels and banking, where my trainer was beginning to sink into a sea of mud, so waste the land was. And everything felt absolutely right at that moment.