I have a small brother ten years my junior and a widow mother. I could well foresee that after leaving school I have to assume the role which my father was destined to play, but could not. He left us in mid-stream.
I secured a job far distant from my village and strange to me in the first instance. Its people and their language is strange; its social manners, dress and food are strange and even the appeal of the city did not seem natural to me.
I work as a typist-clerk and by virtue of my good hold in the English language, the manager of the firm has made me his personal clerk. In the office I am not out of sorts as here the pressure of work leaves little scope for personal musings (= thinkings). But during off-hours the questions of adjustment and of continuance come up. I think, if I am not able to fit into the set-up here, or if the city treats me like an alien (= foreigner), an outsider, how long can I continue. And with me the trouble is that I can not throw up the job in a whim, considering my situation.
So I decide to analyses the position. I have to pick up (=improve state), I think. Since the food in Chennai cannot serve me for an indefinite length of time, I decide to cook my own food. To that end I geared up (= made ready) my kitchen effects. Being used to this much early in life, this first hurdle would not bother me for long.
But language proved the most obstinate obstacle. However I bought a bilingual dictionary that gives the Tamil equivalents of English terms in the Devnagari script. It serves me a lot in shopping, in buses and in journeys.
I must mention at this stage that I am an adivasi from the new Jharkhand state. I am shy of nature and generations of social and political neglect has made me shy and diffident (= opp. of confident). As such I am not able to work myself up (= make efforts) to pick up friends.
I love the city and enjoy her sea coast. Off and on I go and sit by the beach and feel its fine breeze. Sometimes I even see films. But every now and then my thoughts and feelings turn back to my homeland. At times I become terribly homesick as I remember my school days at home. I think that my fate is cruel indeed very to place me at such a remove (= distance) from my native land. I have one or two friends of the north in the office. But their residence is distant from where I stay. In this far-flung city it is not so easy to contact somebody as and when you desire. Another great hurdle for me is that I cannot visit my home at short notice in view of distance and the fair.
I read in my school about culture and race. In my leisure my hours here I realize brutally what these terms mean. I think of father who used to say that our aboriginal or adivasi culture is quite different from the culture of the people who live in plains. He used to tell us of our sufferings, of how we were obliged to embrace Christianity as they educated us, tended us and made us feel that we are human beings. Even then I use to note a difference between our honesty, truthfulness, loyalty and the double-dealing (= two behaviours), lies of others. But here another kind of divorce struck me: the divorce in the cultures of the north and the south. My being of the north seemed to bread a streak of distrust in men here. Some individuals, including my boss, love me and trust me. But that is a personal relationship. At other places I have to carry myself with adequate caution.
It may be that my thoughts and feelings are so like those of an alien because I am too homesick. It may be that in reality the men are not so averse to (= disinclined to) others who come from the north. But I cannot help it, as I am not able to surmount the difficulties of language. I could not be easy with Tamil even after so many months, and English could serve only as a functional language -a language good enough to discharge specific functions.
The worst of my feelings is a kind of loneliness. It chased me like an evil spirit day in and day out.
