My home is tidy and sparse. At times it could feel weightless without the heft of memories. While watching Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I thought about coping with things from the past that still cause pain. In my case, I have given away a lot to the local thrift stores and am not all cleaned up yet. The more I give way the less burdened I feel. Over time the open spaces where things had been acquire a character of their own. It could be the way the sunlight falls there through the window on a winter afternoon, or it way I set my laundry hamper there and forget to take it upstairs. The blank spaces are claimed back from objects now gone along with stories they bore. With so many gaps all around, the story of me, of us who were part of it have imagined and alternate endings. They may traverse through these new spaces in ways they could not have done before.
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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