Skip to main content

Relative Home

The village is lit up with LED lights all colors of the rainbow. Some are blinking, others not. Every tree and house is decorated with lights and in the center where most of the shopping and restaurants are the lights are even more spectacular. In the distance, lasers are beaming on the sky. This is no holiday season and yet the place is more festive that many cities are during Christmas.

I had to wonder how many more lights go on when they have a major holiday. I buy a little vermillion sand bracelet for J. It is meant to ward off the evil eye and attract prosperity. The shop-owner is a young woman probably about the same age as J. We converse using a translator. She wants to know how old J is and if I want smaller or larger beads and picks out something that she thinks would be nice for her. 

Buying a piece of jewelry is always imbued with meaning far beyond the act of purchase. I am thinking the color would suit J great but I want her to a have a piece of a my trip that I had long looked forward to. This is a place she would have loved. I want her safe and protected at all times -  even if random men ask her ask her while she is walking to her apartment from the metro late at night. I learned to make peace with feeling anxious about her to finding my peace by sending good thoughts her way. This bracelet is meant to give my thoughts for her a shape and form. 

A week or so later, when I am back home, I will remember this young lady taking the time to find me something for my daughter as if she were a sister in spirit. I will recall also the dinner we had on the way back to the hotel - how the food was unlike I am familiar with but there was so much of India in it. I had to use my fingers to eat and a Slavic woman in the table across from me who had ordered the same dish smiled at me admiringly. There was no other way to get a handle on that dish - you had to get your fingers dirty. 

The friendly people, the large crowds and the food got me feeling connected to my roots and my childhood while in a foreign country. I know for a fact that as much I enjoyed the visit, this is not a place I want to ever return to. In that there is a certain parallel with time I spend in Kolkata. If I can strip everything away from the experience other than meals with family and friends in the comfort of my parents' home, then it would be a trip to enjoy and even return to. But that is so far not the reality of any visit there and accordingly I am never eager to make it.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

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
111 comments
Read more

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha
5 comments
Read more

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
6 comments
Read more