I am a fake international student. I have no real home; I have homes but they’re scattered. I don’t have a home. Sometimes I feel untethered, like I don’t belong in any one familiar place, like I am floating all the time or being passed around from one to another like in an unending game of passing the parcel. This wasn’t always the case, though. Or maybe it was and it feels more strange now that it’s happening in another country. Cross-country shipping is no easy feat.
Ever since I was little, moving has been a part of the process. Born in Gurgaon and shipped to Bangalore after a few years, then shipped back to Gurgaon for a couple years before finally (or so we thought) moving to Bombay. The city of dreams. Dad’s job not only kept him away from me all day (hello emotional distancing and abandonment issues in adulthood), but also took away all the friendships I made and didn’t get the chance to make in every city we went (did I mention the complementary trust issues?). I was the new girl in every city, big glasses, uncool, chubby cheeks, picky eater and darling pet of the teacher. I never got to have my friend group—I was the weird girl reading in the corner during free time and the one who got picked last in sports class even though I had slightly above average athletic abilities (I swear it). Slowly, the bubble of feeling alone in a sea of kids grew around me and quietened me, shushed me, hushed me.
When we came to Bombay, my parents thought it would be the best idea to put me in a Waldorf school. Yes, the ones where the class teacher and students stay together and learn everything together for all the years until high school. Perfect scenario where a new classmate would be more than welcome. The boys were mean and the class teacher didn’t like me very much. Every day, one parent would send homemade food for the whole class, so they didn’t have to send a tiffin with their kid every morning. Makes sense, but there was one problem. I used to hate seeing cumin grains in my rice, daal and sabji, so I would pick it out of my food every day and decorate the edges of my plate with them, and of course that’s what I became known for. The girl who can’t eat jeera, the primary spice in almost every single Indian dish. As a matter of the class teacher’s principles, we couldn’t waste food—not even a single grain of rice. So, almost every day, after our lunch break got over and the next class has begun, I would sit on the floor outside our classroom and slowly chew the rest of my lunch with my back resting on the door frame.
With time, they gradually absorbed me and I became one of them. Threads woven into the same fabric, peas in one pod and all that Waldorf education Rudolf Steiner school stuff. The girl who I thought was mean to me? Yeah, her and I are inseparable now. The boys who would make fun of my glasses which I would adorn with a different color of nail polish every month now had crushes on me (Yes, me! Stay calm everyone. Cool, calm and collected). One of them even gave me a rose on Rose Day during Valentine week, and that is a big deal in Indian high schools—even in liberal ones like mine—where boys and girls must always be at an arm’s length distance at least. I was becoming a part of the family at school, I had an actual friend group for more than my track record of two years and it felt glorious. That brick-colored building with its unbeatable (and invasive) view of the slums, big brown field with a huge tree in the middle and its staircases wrapped delicately in white jaalis became my happy place. It became the place where I would fall in love with English classes, the place where my friends and I would pass chits to each other during chemistry lessons and the place where I would purposely get sent out of music class along with my friend so we could sit on the green marbled floor with our backs resting on the curved walls.
As I was about to enter eleventh grade, my mom pulled me aside to my room and told me that we might relocate to the U.S. My dad’s company wanted him to move to the States so he could bring some good business by convincing big companies to open offices in India. Months after that fateful conversation in my bedroom, Covid had hit and it was in full swing. My parents were home, one on Zoom in the living room and the other on Microsoft Teams in their bedroom. Embassies almost completely shut down. Visas to go abroad got delayed by months, years and what felt like ages. There was a definite halt for an indefinite amount of time. Life felt like it went on as per usual and the hanging question mark of moving everything we knew to be familiar into another continent slowly disappeared into the background.
When the time came to apply to colleges, I exhausted the websites of every college in India and looking at international colleges wasn’t even on the spectrum of things. As application deadlines steered closer towards me, I kept getting increasingly confused about what to study for the next four years of my life. For context, the whole haha-I-don’t-really-know-what-I-want-to- do-with-my-life cutesy hullabaloo doesn’t really fly in India: right off the bat, fresh out of twelfth grade, you pick a stream—engineering for the toppers of the lot, science for the wannabe- engineers, humanities for the back-benchers, and arts for the class-bunkers and doomed academic failures. I loved to write and paint, so I considered going for the ill-reputed arts degree, but I also really enjoyed learning about the human brain and body in biology and psychology classes, which tore me paper-thin across all streams barring engineering (at least I knew what I didn’t want to do). And, like I said, India doesn’t really rock with the whole liberal arts scene and undecided majors as a concept. You just pick one thing and you stick with it. For the rest of your life. So, since I was as undecided as it gets, I decided to go to the hub of ‘figure it out and find out’—the U.S.
I came to a small liberal arts college hidden away in a small city in Pennsylvania. The city’s population is 29,538 while Bombay’s is 21,673,000—almost a thousand times over the little city’s little number of people. We all spoke the same language, but somehow their dialect was different: a high-pitched sing-songy tune interjected with unnecessary ‘likes’ in every sentence. Like she broke up with him after that and, like, I’m so over it, like, you know? And, get this, what’s up here is code for hello, not an invitation to tell them what is actually up with you. Nobody wants to know, no one is, like, seriously curious. Everyone wants to talk about the weather, or gossip or exchange snapchat usernames (yes, I gave in to the peer pressure and downloaded it. I still don’t get the hype). And, just like our international orientation lecturer predicted, culture shock and homesickness hit hard on the one and a half month mark. Man, I was crying on the shoulder of my Taiwanese best friend for days in a row. I went to my fui’s house in Brooklyn over Fall break and cried in her spare bedroom.
At the end of the semester, I get a call from my mother and she asks me to pull myself aside from the quad and sit down. I sit down on a secluded wooden Adirondack chair and she tells me “beta, it’s not finalized yet, so don’t say anything to anyone. But, we might be moving to the U.S.” My dad’s U.S. work visa was finally in motion and we would know in about a month. 60 days later, I WhatsApp video called mom who was frantically packing up rows of big, brown cardboard cartons. In the winter break, they would move to the U.S. and officially begin house- hunting (or shall I say very-small-apartments-hunting) in areas commuting distance from New York City.
That winter break was the first time I went home after moving to college and the last time I went as someone whose home was still there. Bombay is known as the city of dreams. Every year, thousands of people move to Bombay from all over the country, with little cash in their wallets and big dreams in their hearts. Some settle into the slums of Dharavi and some make it to the skyscrapers in Prabhadevi. My parents abandoned that dream for a bigger one when they came to the United States of America. A bigger dream the shape of New Jersey instead of a big city on the western coast of India. The sound of a white woman billing you at the cash register with a nasal, automated “have a nice day” in place of the big paan-stained smile of an auto rickshawala after you ask him to keep the three rupee change. Successfully hailing a Kaali-peeli (black and yellow) cab in Fort after four consecutive rejections replaced with Uber and Lyft driver cancellations. Subways and Amtracks whizzing you past cities instead of Bombay’s local trains and Rajdhani Expresses. Hudson River versus the Arabian sea. The lady on the statue of liberty, her green stark against the cloudy sky; the Gateway of India painted ochre over the cobalt sky flooded with pigeons fishing for danas thrown by tourists. But the grass does seem greener in the fenced lawns of suburban townhouses.
After those fifteen days in Bombay, we would all move; my grandparents would come to the airport, teary-eyed, to see the three of us off until god knows when. I would go to my parent’s house across the river in a Transbridge bus during Spring break and my fui from Brooklyn would come over for chai. Their house has never felt like a home—it feels liminal, like a break from my actual home. I never used to drink chai or eat chivda at home, but now I do every small thing if it means it will bring me a little closer to home. Something feels amiss here. I always thought home was the people you surround yourself with—I think someone said that in an interview once—try believing that after inhaling the salty air of the sea in Bombay for ten years. How am I supposed to feel at home, at ease, if my face isn’t greasy with humidity as soon as I leave the house? What am I supposed to do when I crave Rustom’s Parsi-style homemade ice cream sandwiched between two slim pieces of wafer? Ben and Jerry’s just isn’t the same. When I need to go to Worli Seaface to ponder about life’s endless questions, where do I go? Staring at the frozen Hudson won’t do it for me. Where is a home? What is a home? Maybe it’s Bombay, but it definitely doesn’t feel like it when I’m couch-surfing at my friends’ houses and am woken up either by their slobbery dogs or grandmother doing aarti in the morning. And it definitely doesn’t feel like it when the security guard at your own apartment building asks you for the flat number of whom you’re visiting and you go blank because you don’t have a home there anymore.
[Hindi]
