Three months is just long enough to begin thinking of a place as home. Especially when you’re given a tiny flat that’s all yours for the duration and in which you can cook, watch TV and mark out a place for yoga. Three months is just long enough to begin to settle even as it’s time to distribute all the things that are left over, to urgently mail books back home, return what’s borrowed and figure out by how much the suitcase is over the economy limit.

Some years ago, I was a Charles Wallace writer-in-residence at Stirling University in Scotland. I’d asked to be there from the beginning of April through June. It was an odd time in my life — as a family, we were still tightly cemented by a death, and this time away would be the first time in nearly two decades that I would be entirely on my own.

I’d published one book of poems, and I was looking forward to the time at Stirling to be able to work on the second. I could use a library again and I’d have an office and the company of the people of the English department.

Stirling University is a little away from the city, in a campus that — especially that sunny spring — seemed straight out of a Wodehouse novel. There’s the Airthrey Castle; a loch, complete with picturesque swans, ducks and little boats; even a golf course. The campus being a part of the erstwhile Airthrey estate, is surrounded by woods, and parkland, all straight out of an idyll.

I was expecting rain and miserable cold. Instead, people were celebrating a warm, early spring: students were out on the lawns having barbecues, playing football and watching the royal wedding on TVs slung out of upstairs windows — I watched this delicate operation from my ground-floor window — and set up on the lawns.

Was it silly of me to feel so lonely in the midst of all this perfection? I’d been too long looking after people to know what to do with myself all alone.

I had all the time in the world to experience both the astonishing beauty of Scotland and the inward, emptying sensation of not knowing why I was there or what I was doing.

I defaulted to what I knew to do: I read a lot. I walked, though not as much as I could have done. I was free to spend all day, every day, out under a tree or by the lake or anywhere outdoors. Instead, I tried to order my day into working hours and free time, like someone obliged to punch the clock.

I didn’t know what to do with the freedom I was given, so I tended to stay close to what was comfortable and familiar.

The Wallace Monument, meant to commemorate William Wallace (you know, Braveheart ), was visible from the campus. There were regular buses from the university into Stirling. In Stirling, there was the medieval part of town, with Stirling Castle, which I visited only when a blog friend (from India) happened by. That was a cold, rainy day of the kind Scotland is so famous for, and it ended rather well with a pub lunch.

On most days, I walked to the other nearby town, Bride of Allan. All these places, so picturesque, were so very small , so quickly seen.

Tethered to Stirling, I visited Edinburgh, Glasgow and other places, including a wonderful little library at Innerpeffray, where I saw a copy of Holinshed’s Chronicles among other treasures. I did the obligatory distillery tour and I learnt to appreciate the bubblegum quality of Irn Bru, raising a toast to Rebus (Ian Rankin’s fictional detective John Rebus) with it. The corridors of the Pathfoot Building at Stirling were an art gallery. They had paintings by Alasdair Gray and Ian Hamilton Finlay. Once everyone had left for the day, I spent a lot of time looking at these works. I read Lanark. I read about Finlay and Little Sparta.

As April changed to May and the exams were done, my friends got busy grading papers or preparing for conferences, and they stopped coming in to the office. Those were the days when it was possible to go an entire day without speaking to a soul. I spoke to myself on the page. I wrote more than I realised, wrote without revising instantly.

I experimented more than I’d ever done, set myself challenges and deadlines — anything to fill the time.

One evening, there was a storm. It was like nothing I had ever experienced, even in the stormiest of pre-monsoon days. Walking back to my flat from the office, the wind was an invisible hand upon my back, propelling me forward. I ran before it. I tried not to think what I would do if I’d needed to walk into it. That night, I was a little afraid.

The next morning revealed so many fallen trees and crushed cars. In the department, tales of traffic mayhem and roofs that needed mending. That, I reminded myself, was the difference between being a visitor and a true resident: the responsibilities that come with staying. I had none here.

I don’t think I ever wrote a ‘Stirling poem’. But much of my second collection was written out of that solitude, in those long, light nights and in time to the sounds and scents of the woods and the warmth.

( In this monthly column, writers chronicle the places they call home )

Sridala Swami is the author of the poetry collection Escape Artist

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