A long-awaited date with solitude

I’m returning to Naples for the first time since my maiden trip to Italy six years ago. The temporary state of aloneness this trip affords me is what I look forward to the most

The thing I miss most about my pre-parental life is not the compendium of ‘secret single behaviours’ or ‘girl dinners’. It’s the sanctity of aloneness, of being solitary and sometimes even stationary, the ability to halt at will, to zone out of social engagements and retreat into myself. I lived independently for almost 10 years. I loved waking up to my own routine and feeling accountable to no one but myself about my bedtime. There were many irresponsible nights, when I should have been tucked under my sheets but was instead out partying with people I no longer remember. It felt so adult, so grown up. And until I met my partner, I was sure my life would more or less continue in this vein. I had no complaints, really. I always got my work done more or less on time and I enjoyed the company of my friends and acquaintances. I felt like I had earned for myself the privilege of travelling at will, and often, of having a rented apartment in South Delhi as my base, a home of my making to which I could always return.

Ever since I became a parent, any sense of a social life got erased. Of course, making a home in another continent where you don’t belong to the languages in use complicates any notion of easy assimilation. Having moved during the height of COVID also meant I couldn’t go out and make new friends through the intervention of either chance or circumstance. My social life in Tramin revolves around our child. I meet other mothers because we see each other and they now, thankfully, talk to me and I feel like I’m part of an ecosystem. But as an immigrant mother of colour, I frequently feel the other kind of aloneness, the one that stems from feeling isolated or like you don’t quite fit in with the place you inhabit.

I’m writing this dispatch on the train from Auer/Ora to Trient/Trento, where I have a 40-minute layover before my high-speed train to Rome, from where I’ll take the train to Naples. It’s the first time I’m returning to Naples since my maiden trip to Italy in 2018. I was with my bestie, Mona, and we had the time off our lives there. I loved the vibe of the city so much because it reminded me of Mumbai, my hometown. It had a certain edginess and lack of pretence that made it so wholly approachable. I was a tourist on that trip. This time I’m going because I’m part of a book launch. I contributed a 5,000+-word essay examining a text by a Black American art critic Henry Martin who had, through a series of incidences that also eventually involved love, made his home in a mountain village in South Tyrol. Of course, his work resonated with me. I knew nothing of his existence until his death, when my mother-in-law alerted me to his obituary in the German newspaper. It is not every day that one sees a tribute to a non-white person in the local German-language newspaper. I later reviewed an exhibition by a curator, Emmanuele Guidi, on Martin and when Guidi had the opportunity to publish his research, invited me to contribute my insights. I seized the opportunity and hand-wrote my essay. I’m excited to be part of the presentation at the contemporary art museum in Napoli.

I’m travelling child-free. At first, maternal guilt made me feel compelled to return asap, but my partner encouraged me to spend an extra day and to think of it as a holiday. He would happily hold the fort. I couldn’t resist. Just the idea of being alone on a train was enough to seduce me. I waited until I was putting our toddler to bed to let him know he would be with his father and grandparents the next three days when he was not at the daycare. He didn’t seem to protest at all. He has understood that I need to work. He tells his father in German.

I’m looking forward to reconnecting with my solitude, to having the opportunity to actually inscribe the words that flow through my consciousness, and to thus possibly finish the last section of my second book. When you’ve lived through a situation where you don’t always have agency over your experience of time, the idea of ‘having time’ suddenly feels like an immense luxury. I want to simultaneously milk it and simply inhabit its finitude, a tall order. Most of all, I want to relish this temporary state of aloneness.

Deliberating on the life and times of every woman, Rosalyn D’Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.

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