My friend E is leaving town soon with her new job. J and I will miss her dearly. She will be giving me all her plants as a Christmas gift for J. Some tinsel and ornaments and I would be all set E tells me. As much as I love greenery around me, keeping those plants alive in my apartment will be a challenge with winter around the corner. I will have to fit watering them into my routine or invest in these self-watering things that seems to be targeted towards amnesic people like me.
An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
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