In the town where I grew up, dust was ubiquitous. It was also stealthy. It would steal in at odd hours and like legions of a multiplying army, settle on every inch of exposed surface. The gold fringed motes danced in a shaft of early morning sunlight, as I lay in bed late on weekends watching their ethereal shapes. In the unseen hours of everyday busyness, they would transform into a clingy solidity greying the window sills and leaving the varnished faces of freshly-minted wooden furniture an ambiguous shade of grainy colourlessness.  The jumbled bric-a-brac of middle-class domesticity in the 90s might have appeared incongruous to an extraterrestrial observer but under the common spell of patina, the screen of our brand new 21 inch colour television and the humble array of my mother’s stainless steel spice containers were each indiscriminately united in dust’s surreptitious embrace. 

There was no one shape or dimension to dust. Dust was variegated. A textured history of place itself. Dust was a cartography of the material sources of belonging. The tactile adhesion of dust to the skin of things is a reference to the deeply enmeshed condition of our apparently individual selves. In our daily failed struggle with dust was a reminder of dust’s undoing of the flinty borders of our identities, a detour into the ecological compost of selves linked in a chain of breath, touch, and taste with the silt beds, crushed coal, and mica shards that made up the dusty terrain of my home town.

Durgapur sits on the banks of the Damodar river, a silted tributary of the Ganga known for its reddish yellow alluvial banks and unpredictable course. It was also in the 90s, the site of heavy industrialisation drawing on the mineral-rich surroundings of the Chhota Nagpur Plateau and the adjoining coalfields. The rocky, undulating topography and an atmosphere saturated with industrial effluvia meant that the air we breathed was gritty with context. If you ran a wet cloth along the woodwork or swept a counterpane left unattended for some days, the colour of the residue that clung to the dishcloth was a sooty charcoal grey. In that tiny industrial hamlet stowed away in every political map at the bottom left corner of a taper shaped state with deltaic tassels fringing the bay, dust was the vibrant rudiment of culture, saturating the very habitus of sensory existence with a sense of time and place. The dense, carbon sedimented dust that clung to us was the particular way in which an entire socio-economic horizon undergird by neoliberal urbanisation and industrial modernity could be read in the rune-like-cipher of the particles that permeated our homes. As a child visiting my grandparents’ house in the hills, I learned how dust is often key to the specific character of a place. That the grey lining that settled on the colonial era windows, trunks filled with my mother’s childhood dresses, and heavy teak-wood cupboards stuffed with family heirlooms: the fine china with watercolour birds of paradise, the souvenirs from my grandfather’s travels, the ivory chess set and Nepali kukris with their ornamental scabbards, was the opposite of the heaviness of smelted ore mingled with red riverine soil. Here at the Himalayan foothills, the dust was almost translucent, grey like attic cobwebs, the light sandy particles strung together like a thinnest of filigree coverlets. 

I was learning the workings of metaphor. Metaphor, like magical thinking can be surreal, is an escape into the elasticity of speculative acrobatics .  In that old three storied building where my mother grew up dust was atmospheric: place, culture, and geology mingled and pulverised into their smallest and most fractured common denominator, a forensic map inviting the inhabitant to endless trails of reconstruction. It was also an eloquent testimony to the literal shapes that time in its passage leaves behind. Running a finger across the spotted glass of an old mirror, watching it cut a sliver of luminosity, I experienced the accretion of years on my fingertip. Unlike the soot-stained fast moving dailiness of my life in the industrial plains, in the storage spaces at my grandparents’ house dust collected in swathes of impasto, time acquired a different dimension: of waiting, suspension, neglect, and forgetting. The dusty surfaces of things from another generation, and other contexts of possession, use, and value were pools of temporal arrest but only illusorily so. In these chambers of ageing where wasps nested, ants burrowed tunnels under the rotting door frame, pigeons flew in through the half broken window pane, and moths were born and extinguished themselves to the dim seductions of an amber bulb whose shade had long disappeared, dust was at once talismanic, archival, and part of a cosmos of metamorphosis, fraying memories and weathered substances, a bridge of permanent loss that could not be crossed and gathered no residue.

Back home during the long summers when the torrid tongues of dry tropical heat bounced off the tarmac, my father took me on scooter rides in the evening, explaining to me as I stood balancing in front holding on to the handlebars, the complicated workings of the steel plant where he worked. Dust became the object of our conversations, a child’s source of bonding with her otherwise emotionally distant father. The particles that he wiped off the black rexine seats in the morning were microcosms of the gargantuan chimneys in which black as night rocks of coal were fed to breathy volcanoes, becoming rivers of liquid steel through the magical alchemy of heat. They were pieces of topography made of bauxite mines and mica beds, red earth and yellow granite held together by vast tracts of sal and eucalyptus forests. They were atoms of an economy of extractive practices and deforestation, industrial pollution and toxic dumping, ecocide and geo-engineering depleting the earth’s resources for the sake of a nationalist progress narrative. Yet, in late spring as the cottony follicles of the crown flower filled the air, and pollen from waxy red silk cotton invaded dust’s aerial imperium with watery eyes and inflamed sinuses, dust was the Möbius strip of inherent contradiction —life and death, vitality and sterility and, proliferation and denudation —existing in interminable mutual and mirrored contact. At school my black Bata shoes would turn a greasy slate grey at the end of a long day. Walking back home I imagined an expanse of dust. In this imaginary town map drawn in dust, miniature tornadoes created by feet in the cement patch of the basketball court, shavings of chalk flying off the blackboard, and stone shavings from the construction worker’s drill sounding the foundations of a new block, triggered new dust routes: young, hybrid, rebellious. 

In my sixteenth year, dust turned to dirt. My father was hospitalised one June weekend and as he spiralled into disease, depression, and silence, dust lost its metaphoric athleticism, its contextual latitude. It became personal. It settled with the force of a landslide and the entombing heaviness of earth. In his room his meticulously arranged desk gathered dirt. The clothes that my mother was too tired to fold or put away after hours of nursing and housekeeping lay in the laundry bleached by the ray of sun that sliced in through the window that remained closed. In it I failed to see the dancing motes. Sunday cleaning in which my parents and I once became the picture of a happy family laying aside our differences for the common conquest of dust faded—like a familiar but impossible memory in a grainy sepia photograph—into a now unstoppable laying of sediment. On Sundays I retreated behind a closed door and numbed myself with the anaesthetic of loud music. My books were all over the floor, my uniform wasn’t ironed, and I stopped my early morning combats with my dust-caked boots slathering Cherry Blossom on their compromised blackness to the tune of Pink Floyd on my tape recorder. That year as the anchors of a home I once knew collapsed into rubble around me and the three of us drifted like ships marooned in our solitary wreckages, I looked at myself in the mirror and felt the dirt inside me. The only place where dust lay hidden now was within, in my failure to hold my family together, in the powerlessness of the perfectionism that had fuelled me for so long to salvage another person from his pain. That summer I launched my last fray with dust’s inroads into myself. I stopped eating. 

In the doctors’ offices and test rooms, I found myself appalled by the futility of resistance to the ubiquity of brokenness. In these prophylactic chambers, in the year-long sojourns in places of utmost human vulnerability, I learned to accept this ubiquity. The new metaphoric horizon that lay in front of me in the contours of my convalescence was the other side of the wholeness I had once felt in conjuring up a myth of a dusty ecology. Underneath the patina we were like drifting matter, essentially debris, chips broken off of former selves carrying traumas and misgivings like edges of jigsaw pieces. Dust was also an unfinished and ruptured ecology. In a last ditch attempt to counsel me, as the well-meaning cardiologist placed the ends of the stethoscope into my ears and end held it to my chest, I heard the beat of my now failing heart, laboured, hesitating, the systoles and diastoles far apart, with an unbearable silence in between. Perhaps this is what the unseen, unheard fall of dust that had us beside ourselves with the agony in our new house, sounded like. A failing heart.

Two years later I boarded a train to a city seven hundred miles away from home. I was no longer beleaguered by a sense of existential unsanitariness but I knew that I had lost faith in the consolations of settlements for good. I had finally turned to dust, leaving the viscous stickiness of alluvium for the nomadism of the desert. In the evening as the train pulled out of my home town passing the factories glimmering like gentle giants in the distance, I was struck by how benign the larger than life fire-breathing, soot-spewing metallurgical dragons of my childhood appeared from a distance. The lights made them look like clusters of fireflies. That’s when it struck me: the twinkling lights resembled the dust motes that once danced in a sunbeam in my bedroom and enchanted my imagination. What attracted me to the motes in those early years was the fact that in the presence of an accidental ray of light dust became incandescent. It combusted out of its own destiny. Dust then, the ultimate emblem of change, I figured as the train gathered speed, was itself changeable.