philosophy supernatural nude

Ithaca, NY to my front door just off the Cowley Road: 4000 miles, three flights, two trains, and one long and bizarre detour through upstate New York, oh my. Also thirty hours in transit. Sic transit gloria mundi. My head hurts.

The problem, you see, is that Ithaca-Tompkins regional airport is an, um, regional airport, and lacks such modern conveniences as instrument-aided landings and X-ray scanners. (All bags are opened and inspected, and bottles of liquid opened, and then the suncream cap not screwed down again properly leading to suncream everywhere, TSA I'm looking at you.) And when I left, early in the morning I think yesterday, there was fog. Thick, slightly eerie, muffling fog, and I was watching while the visibility dropped to twenty metres and then ten, and then nothing at all, and then the incoming flights from Philadephia and Newark circled the runway and turned back, and then the airport was closed.

I went to the Delta desk with a feeling of encroaching despair. (US domestic airlines, hi, they all indiscriminately suck.) But for once, they didn't. I frantically explained that unlike the people around me I was not making a short hop, I was trying to make a connection through Detroit to Heathrow. The agent typed and clicked while I panicked, and then said, how about this. "We fly you out from Elmira, NY, to Detroit, then to Paris, then to Heathrow."

And before I could say anything else, "We'll get you a cab to Elmira. Oh, and I'll put you in first-class transatlantic."

I could have kissed him.

The taxi-ride through upstate New York was eerie. Elmira was the closest airport with the capability for take-off in fog, so that's where the diversion took us, and it was about an hour's drive through a landscape that soared around through the low-lying mist. In England, the landscape rolls; there it loomed. Elmira when it appeared was pretty tiny, and the aircraft even tinier - propellors! - but it got me safely to Detroit, and thence onwards towards Paris. The upgrade was fabulous. I got served dinner on a tablecloth! And then slept lying flat whilst 30,000 feet above the Atlantic. It was marvellous. I even caught myself wishing the flight were a couple of hours longer so I could really catch up on sleep. (I have just emailed Delta about their wonderful customer service, in lieu of kissing their agent.) I got home this afternoon entirely exhausted, but it really wasn't the worst experience ever. I even got to practice my very bad French in Paris.

But, but. Ithaca, you guys. Ithaca is gorgeous. (Despite the tourist board's sloganeering, I liked it so I put a U in it.) It really is. It is teeny teeny tiny - you wander around the downtown area and keep coming to the end of it by mistake - and a good half of it is made up by Cornell, which sprawls handsomely around the town with its imposing buildings and enormous swathes of greenery. Everything is so trim, so pretty, with the gorges as these sudden, beautiful gashes in the landscape. Because I am the smartest person on the planet, I picked Cornell's reunion weekend as my weekend to visit (how I found somewhere to stay is still beyond me), and the town was buzzing with people, and something of their excitement was in the air; at any rate, I thought it was auspicious to see Cornell for the first time when it was surrounded by people who loved it enough to have travelled miles to get back that weekend.

The law school, in particular, was having its fifty-year reunion, and was thus full of balloons and the class of 1960. They all added a suitably surreal touch to what was a surreal journey - I mean, I applied to Cornell, I was accepted, I've seen pictures, but still I couldn't picture myself there, in those halls that aren't so much hallowed as entirely alien, and I don't know if I can yet. But I made a step, I think; I made several steps. I opened a bank account, I signed a lease, I discussed with the registrar which courses I should take, I figured out Ithaca's rather marvellous public transport system, I climbed a lot of hills. (Am I doomed to hills? I currently live halfway up about the only hill in Oxfordshire.)

Mostly, I was surprised by the kindness of strangers. I got lost and was led to where I was going for miles out of their way by gently amused undergrads, a guy who was passing made calls on my behalf when I missed an appointment with a potential landlord, the people at the law school loaded me up with information, leaflets and gift cards to the local bagel shop. Strangers stopped me when I was clearly going in the wrong direction and put me right. About twelve different people assumed I was an admitted freshman but were still kind when I told them I wasn't. I would say, o hai, do I look seventeen to you, but I'm sort of afraid of the answer. One of the undergrads blushed and told me he liked my accent. What a wonderful place. And I'm glad I thought so, because I'm committed now: I signed a lease, and fell in love with a local restaurant (Moosewood, possibly the best vegetarian restaurant I've ever been to).

More than anything else, I was sorry to leave. I think I'm really doing this.

Today did not begin as what Hawkeye Pierce calls a full rich day - I got out of bed at lunchtime, Shim having lured me out with Peruvian coffee, then I picked up my bike from the shop, I tried a Lush cupcake-flavoured face mask, I went over my business law mock (verdict: if you did some work, you could get a distinction, why don't you do some work), and then settled down to reading about company liquidation.

But things change. I have had two startling pieces of news in the last two hours.

-Firstly. I have received an email from the University of Chicago Law School. They want me to know that they are very impressed with my credentials but have run out of space, thus far, in the LLM programme, and so they are putting me in a standby group (people drop out, people don't get funding, or most amusingly of all, they decide that the overall group lacks geographical and ethnic diversity). I should hear from them again by April about whether or not they want to admit me.

My thoughts on this are mixed. First of all I am not filled with hope about being admitted - I've been waitlisted before, by the UCl Medical School, and they waitlisted me in January 2005 and finally rejected me in May, and on the whole these things don't work out. But on the other hand, the email included the statistics. The law school have already rejected seventy percent of their applicants, just about, and I have spent the last two years doubting myself. Wondering if I am really smart, if maybe I was fine at school but am not cut out for higher education, if maybe I am only pursuing professional training because I am not good enough for academia. And whether or not I am finally admitted, an incredibly good US law school thinks that for its academic Masters programme, I am better than seventy percent of the people who applied. I think I feel good about that.

-Secondly. My mother has returned from India - from Delhi, though recently from Kolkata, Silchar and Bangladesh. She had gone to Bangladesh with my Dadu (who is not my grandfather, actually - he is my mother's father's youngest brother, my biological grandfather having died in the seventies), having acquired visas and permissions with great difficulty, for good reason. My mother's family are Bengalis, Hindus, and ancestrally, they come from what is now Bangladesh. Dadu, then thirteen or fourteen, and the rest of the family, fled over the border in 1947 soon after Partition.

Dadu has wanted to go back for many years. Not for good, he says, but he wanted to see the place again, "before I die". My mother has wanted to make this happen for nearly as long. So, she stayed on long after I and most of the rest of the family had left, and flew to Silchar to see her sister and my cousins, and then on Monday they set out from there to Karimganj, where they planned to cross the border at the Kushiyara River. My mother said, at this point she was ready for anything, but mostly for the place to be like Nilam Bazaar, the village in Assam where the family settled, and where until recently we had a house – impressive, and surrounded by mango trees and coconut palms, but run down, at the end of dirt tracks, and impossibly remote. (I broke my ankle there, once – it took a week before it was looked at. It's a far away place.)

The boat, she said, had the Indian flag on the one side, and the Bangladeshi flag on the other, and once they had got through the lengthy process of immigration – I have never crossed a border by surface! - they went to Sylhet, which, my mother said, she thought was a village. It was in 1947, but now it is a small city, and they rented a car – a Toyota, my mother said, in quiet wonderment – and drove down paved, easy roads that looked like English ones, she said, complete with the same sorts of speed limit signs, looking for another village.

They couldn't find it. Dadu couldn't recognise anything; they stopped and asked someone, and he didn't know what they meant or what they were looking for. My mother had an idea – consult people of Dadu's age. So they stopped at a doctor's surgery with old people in the waiting room – Muslims, my mother said, with dhari and topi - and asked them. The people there told them that they had missed the village, driven past it – but they knew which village. They knew my grandfather's name, and his father's name.

So they went back. And the village when they came to it, was bigger, and Dadu didn't remember it, but they found a house that he thought was the one, and they knocked on the door. The family who lived there invited them in, and gave them tea and food, and said that they were the third people to live in that house since Partition. The first people to live there had taken over the empty space after Dadu and his mother and siblings had fled, and they had sold the house to another family, who had sold it to the current owners. They were very kind, my mother said – another Muslim family, who couldn't do enough for them, showed them around and fed them and made them feel welcome. Dadu said when he saw the house, he knew it was the right place, and said, I was born in this house – but he hadn't been there, he said, for more than sixty years.

And he said to the people who lived there, that my grandmother, my Didibhai, has never been to this place, but she is the bahu of this house – its daughter. And they went outside and cut four coconuts from the palms, and gave them to her, as the gift for the bahu for the house, for her to take away.

They went back to Sylhet and hoped to go home, but apparently you cannot cross the border outside of office hours, and it was past five o'clock and they had to find a guesthouse. Which was perfectly nice, my mother said – she had been picturing the sort of huts you would have left behind, in 1947! - but they hadn't been planning to stay, so none of them had anything to sleep in, or really anything beyond what they were standing up in. And she explained this to the driver, who had a bright idea. He drove them to the local mosque, who lent them four lungi to sleep in, and bought a single tube of toothpaste between them all. It was an adventure, my mother said, and they returned them to the mosque before they left!

And in the morning they went back, and crossed the river to India.

I wish I could have gone. Even though I couldn't, I am so happy that they found the place – that my family comes from somewhere, that in the end Dadu could go home.