“He had not perceived them because he had become accustomed to them.”
The reality that we accept gives us only that many said and laid reasons and chances to move forward as its logic allows us. Such is the world of the crystal shop's keeper who, as yet, had never thought of what could possibly lay beyond the shop, let alone try to expand to make it a bigger business. His world is in The Alchemist is sustained in itself. It is self-explanatory and has itself as its own reference without outside meaning ever intervening until Santiago shows up. This is also the logic of a woman’s acceptance of her immobility because they are certain to marry, birth, and nurture, in that order. At least, the Indian/Eastern woman is largely expected to play that role, and therefore, is a reality created around her that makes her want to fulfil these norms in order to feel content. In fact, there is a possibility that the world of the shopkeeper then is our common world; isn't it? for when I looked around it amazed me, and still does, to acknowledge that many-a-woman whom I have known, including me, never even thought of dreaming a common man’s dream of owning or buying a car or a home.
However, the real challenge/change comes only when one enters a world different from theirs and where destiny proves to be fruitful. We perhaps enter this world with a “universal language” of dreams and supple human thoughts that go through a life. A universal life which is considered as the natural ordeal of being a human and is something as obvious as loss and separation that almost every human being knows and goes through. The Alchemist is a lot about the reality that is built around us, and the crevices through which, our protagonist, Santiago, hopes to find his destiny and dreams. It is a fantastic tale in the sense that millions of us are unable to realise what Santiago seems to understand through the course of meeting the alchemist and his lady love, Fatima. For some years into his journey and Santiago;
“...had lived intensely every day away from home”, but “love required them to stay with the people they loved.”
One left home to find other homes in the world. These are unfamiliar and unknown places. So, how do they even become homes; what is it that so finds a place in a person’s heart that the place becomes a home, and the home just a space? In modern times then, are we destined to struggle, then struggle a little more if we always want to stay at ‘home’. I could help but think now that the very concept of home is contrary to human nature. Yet love, love like a fantastic fable or a dream made you stay; be it staying put or staying on course. The latter reason is related to a different object of love, which in turn, gives rise to yet another fantastic dream of the return home.
I remember consoling a friend in the first few months of staying in Spain, telling him valiantly that we should not miss home, and that at the moment, as some 20-year-olds, we don’t belong to one home anymore, only to find out a couple of months later, in a lockdown, that familiarity can make anyplace home. Yet, I had to return home to India in a month, leaving a home behind and hoping to return to it sometime later in my life when many journeys later I would look for relief, love, or familiarity.
So the dream and its pursuit might as well, as a final reward, lead to a return home. But this is something that is eternally deferred — for as soon as one reaches home, one immediately starts dreaming of returning to it again, hoping to work against the real fable of home and fulfilling the dream.
But women at home and men in pursuit of their dreams lead us to different meanings of home in The Alchemist as, “Fatima went back to her tent, and when daylight came” she goes “out to do chores she has done for years to come.” This is after she finds in Santiago, her love and meaning of life. She never dreams or can dream of returning home. She can dream only as much as going to another home, but that is without the dream of a return home. Therefore, as the man goes out to dream about a return home, the woman hopes to be united to a man and dream of his return. For all her savviness and persistence, Fatima’s life seems to get a greater meaning and subsistence when she starts to wait for Santiago. Of course, we now belong to an increasingly feminist world, but that world is part of a very, very small number of real worlds. The rest of them are inhabited by women bound to domesticity. It does not take long to question a woman’s and a man’s specific role — at least for a country like India that’s still revelling in a confused morality, something that Rabindranath Tagore enunciated long back in 1922, in its tryst with modernity to close in on what constitutes our adulthood and dreams.
The Alchemist is for the dreamers and it makes us want to move beyond our contentment, but the only catch here is our contentment - the working principle of the reality that most of us accept as and in life.
Santiago’s journey, then, might be our only way out of a world of contentment.
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