Coming to India

We’re leaving, I told myself.

I looked out at the red and yellow heliconia dangling like brilliant earrings in the postcard-sized garden of our Singapore condo. A sunbird groomed and fussed over one flower, then another. We’re leaving all this.

But for where?

We could go back to America and become insomniac mortgage slaves, our lives transmogrified into a whirl of commuting, picking up lumber from Home Depot, cutting our grass, spraying 409 around the house, whipping up plasticky macaroni for our kids, and whizzing them off to daycare and Little League games in the minivan we’ve washed and detailed and vacuumed because we spend so much time sitting and eating in it. We won’t have time for ourselves or for friends, an affordable luxury one gets used to in Asia. In America, parents of young children do not have much of a social life of their own. They wring themselves into their wage work, and squeeze any other time they can fight for into their children. The only friends they have are parents of their kids’ friends.

We could of course go to India. Home is where you go in the end to put your head down, and India is home, too.

I suppose, says a part of me niggardly. All right, I grant that it is more than a small part of me. Bigger than I care to admit sometimes.

It is home. I have tried at various times of my life to spread the branches of my self, pushed them with desire and ambition to places far away. But the kernel of my seed, the roots of my being are here. I hate and love this place intensely.

I didn’t leave India because I hated it. I could have stayed on, although looking back I am glad I did because it set me on the trajectory of finding and making my own happiness.

At the time I left, long before liberalization, there wasn’t very much that was interesting for me to do other than get married like the rest of my cousins, or get a job for not much money because my family didn’t have the connections to help me find something that my grades and ambition deserved.

My professors at the elite Calcutta college I graduated from clamped their lips into polite smiles when they heard I was sacrificing more years of feasting on Elizabethan poetry and Restoration drama for the prospect of studying – if it’s possible to really call it study – journalism in America. Why after the privilege of studying with some of the best literature professors in the country, did I want to soil my hands at some trade school for some dubious qualification?

“Why do you want to study about telegraph poles?” mumbled the head of the English department when I went to pick up a letter of recommendation he had written to a school of mass communication somewhere in the Midwest. I looked at him. He was not being ironic. His face showed concern and disappointment. He was a kind man who had electrified our class with his mournful interpretive readings of Yeats’ tragic drama, transporting us from the dank classroom with its pigeon crap-stained benches. I was taking the jeweled heirloom he had shared with us and was traipsing off unworthily to use it to fix plumbing.

I glanced at the recommendation on my way downstairs. The praise in it made me flinch with guilt and confusion. Was I throwing my life away?

As I stepped away from the Victorian columns and skittered across the street dodging pushcarts and trams and rickshaws and buses, I was grateful for my choice. I didn’t want to worship the embalmed. I wanted to throw myself into the hungry ardor and the sweat of the living as they pushed and elbowed a space out for themselves.

I’m going to fast forward here. I got that master’s degree in journalism. I worked for an American newspaper, traveled to incredible places, met my future husband and married him, had a baby, got burned out at my job, took time off, became a full time mother and had another baby.

Now, two decades, dozens of moves and two children later, I’m back in India.