Skip to main content

Coming Home

I will be traveling alone to India for the first time since I immigrated to America. For most people there is nothing remarkable about such an event but it created a heightened sense of anxiety about the trip for me - beyond the usual that travel brings about these days. I will be meeting family members I have not seen in close to thirty years - people who were once close and then drifted away largely due to physical distance also drift from what used to be a joint family once. 

I realized that I don't know much about my cousin who I last saw when she was still in high school. Since I don't do social media, I have no idea how time has shaped her. But I wanted to get her a little something because she is still my baby sister. After hours and days of struggle I landed on a gift that felt right. I won't know until I give it to her and even then I might not. 

We plan to meet a couple of days after I arrive - it will be in a sense a return to childhood. My parents, her parents (my uncle and aunt) and the two of us. She is child-free and career demands has her living away from her husband for the last few months. I tried to imagine as I packed my bags how it will be to sit around the dining table at my parents' home as we had done years ago in the same configuration as we will find ourselves in now. 

If that will somehow make return to a time and place in our lives left far behind. My aunt used to be a force of nature back then - its the mental image I still have of her. She has been ailing for a good decade and the years have caught up to her. My uncle used to be a thoughtful man prone to making pithy observations about life even in casual conversation. It was as if he examined what was around him a lot closer than the rest of us did, leading to discoveries that we would have never made. C herself when I last spoke to her sounded like an astute woman - that was my strongest impression from our short conversation. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Changing Pace

This blog has been a big part of my life for the last five years. Besides giving me the opportunity to connect with a number of interesting people and share my thoughts and ideas with them, it has been a form of daily meditation for me. No matter what the day threw my way, I made a very deliberate effort to find a little quiet time to write.The process of thinking about what to write and then the act of writing itself worked as an antidote to aggravations big and small. Five and half years ago, when I started Heartcrossings both my personal and professional lives left a lot to be desired for. The only real happiness I had was in being J's mother. While that was often enough to make me forget what I did not have, I sorely needed a third place to call my own and shape in the likeness of my dreams. This blog has been where there were no limits or constraints and that was absolutely exhilarating - it is the reason I have been able to nurture it for as long and as much as I have. A lot ...