I opened this month's heating bill with much trepidation and after seeing the total heaved a sigh of relief. The "system" had managed my expectations beautifully. I was mentally prepared to pay twice as much and would have only winced a little. In these hard times, there are lots of fuel saving tips floating around, but cooking with lava is a off the beaten track. Living next door to a volcano is not all that bad. I have to pay closer attention to recruiters looking to fill positions in Hawaii.
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...
Comments