The Provençal Winds and Mal du Pays
It is extremely windy these days here in Provence. It has been the better half of a year since I have been living here and I still haven’t been accustomed to the sheer speed of these winds. In Delhi, these winds would be classified as storms, but here it is just life — the Mistral winds of the Mediterranean. It feels great when you’re indoors during these few days of Mistral every other week, because you hear the violent sounds of the wind from the inside, and something about it just feels very homely: it is perhaps the security of being indoors, the innate introverted-ness that hops out time-and-again no matter how extroverted I get in this new country. Often, these winds are accompanied by rain — rain that is just annoying enough for you to want to rush home to shelter. Rains in Delhi are different: they usually are the result of a heatwave and usually go either two ways. They are either a relief from the terribly scorching heat or they add to it through their humidity, there is no middle ground. There is no room for compromise. Here, the rain seems to understand your plight and annoys you just enough. Of course, the view of the Mediterranean Sea doesn’t disappoint when it is indeed raining.
This week has been so eventful that in retrospect, it feels like a very long time has passed. When I say “eventful”, I don’t mean “interesting”, I mean “packed”. I had some exams and I was stressing for them as I always do. There is a difference this time around though. When I usually stress before any exam, at the end of it, the ends justify the means, because I am usually very certain that I did very well. This time however, I am not so sure. Evidently, there has been an evolution, and I don’t know if it is a good thing or not, but oh well. I had exams on Wednesday and Friday, and both the days, the weather was terrible. On Wednesday morning, we also found out that the examiners had forgotten us completely and hadn’t printed our question papers. I don’t know if it is somehow telling of how needy I am that an examiner forgetting that I had to take the exam somehow felt worse than the possibility to not take the exam. So, Wednesday was… interesting.
What an irony that it was cloudy and just terrible throughout the day, and at 8pm, it was this sunny.
Funnily enough, the sun was out on Thursday. It felt like the sun had a personal vendetta against me because I couldn’t possibly go out on Thursday because I had to revise for my exam on Friday (and also because I am extremely self-centred and think that everything revolves around me).
Thursday was somehow a perfect day because it reminded me of my afternoons in India — how I would come back home from school after a long, tiring and hot summer day, and my mother would ask how my day went, and I would tell her every little detail of whatever happened in school that day. It reminded me of my mother’s mutton curry, the taste of which comes back to my salivating mouth as I think of it. I like the French expression for homesickness — they call it mal du pays, literally, pain of the country. It somehow feels more real, more profound.
This is a bird that I would see often perched in front of my study room window back in India. Thursday reminded me of this bird.
I am satisfied with how my exam went on Friday. It was, again, extremely windy, following a perfectly warm day, only because I had an exam. This exam was a culmination of three months of anxiety, not because I hated the subject or was bad at it, I was just scared of the professor that took the course. So right before (and during) the exam, there was a huge adrenaline rush in me, which resulted in a sudden and complete lethargy once it was over. I did not have the energy, or the desire, to socialise with anyone — this was the first time this year that I did not eat lunch with friends on a weekday, and I was okay with that. Of course, the lack of my desire to socialise was also corroborated by the fact that it was extremely windy thanks to the infamous Mistral, that I wanted to come back home as soon as I could. I still have another week of exams to go through, but at least I know that there is a reward of vacations at the end of it.