Half Sweet n' Half Nuts

The last three weeks have convinced me that the airplane is not just a modern technological marvel intended to cover large distances at super fast speeds. It’s a lot more than that. It’s an inter-planetary cum time travel magical something which can warp one’s sense of reality in a matter of hours.

There are innumerable differences between India and the USA; I don’t need to re-iterate those. The differences between my life there and my life here, however, are mind boggling! In fact I’m sure both lives cannot exist on the same planet in the same age. I am the same person in both places, but then again not quite. I’m not quite certain which is more “home” to me so to avoid confusion I’m going to refer to my home in India as “there” and my home in LA as “here”, simply because I’m blogging from LA at the moment.

Over there I’m the kid without a care. I simply ask for anything I want and I get it, be it a glass of water or money for a night out. I don’t drive; never have and doubt I ever will. I don’t need to worry about what is for dinner or when to do my laundry. More than the trivial chores, it’s my attitude. I am blissfully childish. I lie in mom’s lap, I cuddle up to dad, I whine and complain, and I talk nineteen to the dozen about everyone I have known and met as if I just got back from my first day at school. I'm truly without a care in the world.

Here it's a completely different story. It's not just that I have bills to pay or that I need to do my chores myself or that I'm responsible for feeding myself. It's somehow a lot more than that. I'm a thinking, working, responsible adult here. I'm a lot more aware of my surroundings. I pay attention to details because I know it's necessary for me to survive. When I go about my daily chores, I'm not just helping out mom, I'm doing my work. If I don't do the laundry, it won't get done magically; I'll eventually run out of clothes to wear!

While it’s true that when I’m here I often crave the pampered life of a child, it is also true that when I come back here I do breathe a sigh of a relief. Don't misunderstand me - I love my family and friends and my country. But it's a lot easier to be my own person here, even though nothing is restricted or frowned upon by my folks there and I can do as I please. But while nothing is handed to me on a platter over here, there is still an independence that comes with the responsibility, which is liberating.

All my life it seemed like I was destined to be a rolling stone, never really stopping anywhere for more than a couple of years. I was a boarding school kid right from Elementary School. After I left the school I had studied in for 10 yrs, my last 2 years of High School were spent in a different Boarding School, followed by 5 years in Delhi (undergraduate college and my first job). In those 5 years I changed homes 4 times. After that I spent a little over a year in Chennai, a little less than a year in Seattle and finally I've been in LA for the last two years.

It's not surprising that I have never thought of the town/village where my parents lived and where I was born as my hometown. Other than a few of my parents’ friends I know no one from there and as a child (probably after the age of three) I never spent more than a couple of months in year there. In fact, over the last few years, I haven't been there for more than a couple of weeks in a year.

Since it was in Delhi that I really made the transition from teenager to adult and since it's the city I have lived longest in, I always thought of it as my hometown. The city of my first school doesn't really count since we got to leave the school boundaries (just for the day) only three or four times in a year. I've loved Delhi the way I could never love any other city. I'm not quite melodramatic enough to equate my love for the city to my love for my mother, but I do agree that it's a bond that can't be logically explained. I know its faults and weaknesses. Today I may not even like what I see. But I still inexplicably love it. I can't explain it any better.

My trip this time was not all a bed of roses. It was in fact scary and heartbreaking. There is an age, somewhere around 10 or 12 maybe, when you realize that your parents don’t have all the answers. And then there is an age, probably in your late teens if you grew up slow like me, when you find out that your parents are not even always right. They’re just as human as the rest of the world; they can be misinformed and even worse, that they can make mistakes. And then comes an age, which is right about now for me, when you realize you can’t always be the child and you have to be the adult in the family and take care of your parents in stead of expecting them to take care of you as they always have been.

I realized that I had changed from when I had left and what I had left behind had changed as well. My life there was changing within the walls of my home as well as outside. Outside my home, on the streets of Delhi, the despairs and frustrations were a lot more visible to me. The city that was bursting at its seams with people fighting every minute of every day to get a little space for themselves was not the city where I had found my identity. Today I'm not one of its teeming millions, I feel alien. What shocked me most was our driver re-iterating, like a mantra, a dozen times a day, "iss city mein dhamaka hona chahiye! Sab saaf ho jayega! Hum mar bhi jaye toh koi problem nahi, aane waalo ko toh jageh milegi! ... Airport se Noida tak ek bada sa bomb blast ho jaye.. bas!". (This city needs an explosion. It will clean up everything. Even if we die, I don’t care, at least those who come after us will find place to walk! … just one big bomb to clean up everything from the airport till Noida.)

It was amusing yet scary at the same time. If this is what the common man on the roads of Delhi feels what hope can there be?!

I don't mean to diss the city or its people. These were just my experiences while I was there and it was probably more because of how much I had changed rather than my family, or Delhi, or its people. All the same, my illusion was shattered. And it became a lot easier to decide that I couldn’t go back. I know my parents needed someone to be with them. But that’s a luxury I couldn’t afford. The sad truth was I would be more useful doing something with my life in LA in stead of doing nothing in the village that time and civilization forgot on the pretext of looking after them. I was tired of living my life of a nomad and I had finally found my corner in the world but it was nowhere near where I was born. Would it be easy living miles away from my family and my country? Definitely not. Is the smart thing to do? Only time will tell. Is the right thing to do? I don't know, but I do know it's the only thing I can do to be happy and make my parents proud. Am I being selfish? I don't think so, though I know many will disagree.

They say home is where the heart is. I think my heart is, at the moment, somewhere in Spain, drinking in the beauty of Madrid. Or maybe just drinking in London! Hehehe!

I guess that explains why when I was landing I was confused about whether I was returning home or coming back from home. Sigh!