LESSONS FROM MY FIRST MONTH AT LA TROBE BY BINAYA KANDEL Every Hindu child grows up with the story of Arjun and the fish. Dronacharya lines up his students, points at the wooden fish rotating above the water, and asks each one what they see. One sees the tree. Another sees the sky. Someone sees the fish, the branch, the reflection below. When it is Arjun's turn, he says he sees nothing but the eye. Just the eye. Everything else has dissolved. That is why the arrow finds its mark. I kept coming back to that image during my first month in Melbourne. Not because I had Arjun's clarity. But because I was standing there with the bow, the fish was somewhere up there, and I genuinely could not tell you where. I came to Melbourne with my wife, my daughter, six overpacked suitcases, and what I can only describe as a very optimistic idea of how quickly things would come together. La Trobe had accepted me for a PhD. That was the dream, the plan, the thing I had worked toward. What I had not fully reckoned with was everything that surrounds a PhD when you are also simultaneously trying to figure out which bin to put out on which day, how to open a bank account, where the nearest grocery store is, and how to make your daughter feel at home in a school where she does not yet know a single face. The PhD was the arrow. But the world around it was a lot of noise. A few weeks after arriving, my supervisor mentioned almost in passing that she was selling her Mercedes-Benz C200 and offered to use until I settle or get another car. I said yes immediately, and I am glad I did. In Nepal, you do not need a car the way you need one here. The kirana pasal is down the road. The school is nearby. If you need something, the neighbourhood provides it, or few strides will get you there. Melbourne does not work that way. Here, you drive to the grocery store, you drive your daughter to school, you drive to the university, you drive to everything. The car was not a comfort. It was infrastructure. Without it, the basic logistics of our family’s daily life would have taken months to sort out. The school run alone, getting my daughter dropped off in the morning and picked up in the afternoon, became one of those small but anchoring routines that held our days together when most else was still uncertain. I called it a fortune above coincidence. Because it was. Not just a car. A foundation under a family still finding its footing. Now, here is the part I do not tell people at parties. My first week with the car, I had a collision. Not on a busy road. Not navigating some complicated Melbourne intersection. On the driveway of my own residence. The car was barely moving. The damage was small. But I sat there for a long moment afterwards feeling every bit of it, because there is something specifically humbling about being a person who has driven through the roads of Nepal, the chaos, the narrow lanes, the constant negotiation of space, and then misjudging a stationary driveway in suburban Melbourne. The Crash Nobody Tells You About A New City, A New Life, A New Everything The Mercedes That Came at Exactly the Right Time THE ROAD AND THE RESEARCH 6
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