Creating Memories

There are special memories from childhood and youth that I want to share with J but cannot translate their signifance for me to her. For instance, there was the time when I first heard the song Jodi Kichu Amare Shudhao by Debabrata Biswas and a long time after than when I first understood the lyrics. So many ways and reasons to love the same piece of music.

When I play that song for J, she grows wisful for reasons she cannot understand or explain yet. "Sometimes I feel that way when I listen to beautiful music" she says. It is how I used to feel once and still do. That and other music will mean entirely different things to us, evoke entirely different memories ten or twenty years out. It makes me happy to know that some of them will be the ones we made together - mother and child.

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Part Liberated Woman

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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Heartcrossings

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