Walking along Wellington’s waterfront, you’ll come across a series of sculpted quotes about the city from the works of some of New Zealand’s best-known writers. One in particular, by the poet Lauris Edmond, caught my eye when I first arrived here in 2010.

“It’s true you can’t live here by chance,

you have to do and be, not simply watch

or even describe. This is the city of action,

the world headquarters of the verb — ”

To be honest about my reaction at the time, I mocked the thought. I admired the verse, found it energising, inspiring… and misapplied. As a one-time Bombayite, I thought lines 2-4 especially could be engraved onto the Gateway of India. Now there’s a worthy, and plausible “world headquarters of the verb”. Wellington wasn’t even the prime “city of action” within New Zealand!

The last six years have been a gradual but constant process of me conceding ground to Lauris Edmond, although I still see no need for the ‘world headquarters’ hyperbole. Yet it’s not as though Wellington has changed dramatically in this time. Nor has my life, or, perhaps, ‘dramatically’ isn’t the right word. But I sense that I am different now, and trying (at least) to “do and be” more has been a big part of it. And Wellington has been the space that has greatly enabled many of these efforts.

This would be a good time to slip in that I haven’t had a single full-time job since moving to New Zealand. Some days, and triggered by no one else, I feel anxious and apologetic about this fact. Yet it has also been the spur that has urged me to continually imagine all manner of new ‘fillings’ for this time. Owing entirely to the support and generosity of my wife, who has accepted everything I have brought in kind in place of a regular salary, I have had the singular privilege of living through a very open time in a very open place.

I’ll begin with the easy examples. Wellington is basically a fish-hook of hills around a stunning harbour. Over a period of driving up those hills daily, and past many runners and bikers my age and older who had made this their thing to do either at lunchtime or on their way home from work, I realised those footpaths, woods and gardens were an open invitation to me as well, and began running for the first time in 20 years.

A local tennis club put a flyer in our mailbox, welcoming new members. I went over, and very soon I was playing thrice a week — again for the first time since I was 15.

So, unemployed dude takes up running and tennis. Big deal. True, but my other point was that it just felt very easy here to step up and begin something new, or ask to try it out if it involved other people. I said once to an English person on a plane who was visiting NZ for the first time that she would notice many familiar practices and pursuits, but their meaning here might be different. I used several sporting examples: golf, rugby of course, tennis, or sailing a boat. There are far fewer, if any, fences or connotations around groups of people doing these things. You pick up a racquet, and that’s all it means, not that you’ve suddenly become ‘socially better’. The undiscounted annual subscription for my tennis club, I told her, was just over a hundred quid.

One day a friend mentioned that he was part of a group that was taking creative writing classes to prisons. I asked if I could join: both the group and the department of corrections welcomed me.

Others I have known in this time, friends from here or recent arrivals, have used this openness I’m trying to describe, to achieve far more incredible things. Getting deeply involved with refugee families, for example, or attaining a long-dreamt-about astrophysics Master’s while also working full-time.

Perhaps it was the same thing in the air that emboldened me to recklessly reassure my wife four years ago, as she prepared to return to work after her maternity leave, that I would try my very best and not mess up too much at being the stay-home parent to our 10-month-old daughter, despite having zero experience at solo infant care. Perhaps it was the Wellingtonian in her that agreed.

But Lauris, you were kind of right, or maybe reading your words in my very first week subtly influenced everything that followed. For years now, I’ve been a bit of many things, parent above all, and then writer (yes, Lauris, you’ll be pleased to know I continue to love watching and describing inseparably from being and doing), teacher, runner, and so on. And Wellington, my home, has accepted me in whatever shifting terms I’ve described myself, and always held open the welcome — in its characteristic, not-loud, simply-look-around-and-see-what’s-possible way — to put up my hand and try a few more things.

( In this monthly column, authors talk about the places they call home )

Rajorshi Chakraborti is the author, most recently, of the short fiction collection Lost Men

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