It’s the first week of May’26 and it’s been raining today since morning. I am at home and feeling cozy and stoic. I am getting an urge to write something nice and put words to my thoughts and so here I go.
Where is home?
It’s been two years since I moved to the US. In the last 24 months, I’ve spent just about 2 months back in India. These 2 years went by super quick. It feels like our wedding day was just a few weeks back. But now when I reflect back on these years, I keep pondering over one question – where is home?
For the first 32 years of my life, I had a definitive answer to that question. Home was one place and that was my home city in India where I lived with my parents. That is where my identity belonged. My family, my friends, my daily routines, everything.
But now after having lived in this city in California for over 2 years with my wife, the answer to that question is no longer definitive. This place has gradually grown on me and now equally feels like my home.
New Life v2.0
We began our married here in 2024. After having lived apart from each other in a very difficult long-distance relationship phase that laster over 7 years, we finally started living together. It was dream life that we imagined ever since we were kids and we’re finally living our dream. Sometimes, it’s just feels surreal.
Ever since we started living here, it’s like a version 2.0 of our lives. We’ve found new friends, we’ve built new social circles. New life contexts, new topics of discussions, new activities, everything new.
Somewhere along the way, this life stopped feeling temporary in my mind. Now I have developed a sense of belongingness here.
Fading sense of missing home
When I moved here, initially it was difficult because the level of intensity of missing my home and life in India was super high. I missed my parents, my friends, my family, my daily routines, my way way of life, I missed everything. There was a constant emotional pull and a sense of longing that was hard.
But over time, that intensity of missing my old life has lowered. This is a very weird and strange feeling. It’s very unsettling. It feels like I am betraying myself, my own identity. It’s a cocktail of mixed feelings that I cannot make sense of.
Slowly drifting relationships
One of the toughest parts of this weird feeling is dealing with the reality of how my old relationships are slowly drifting away.
The friends I once couldn’t imagine my life without, are now slowly making way for new ones. The life updates we once shared on a daily basis, the weekend meetups we had, the long and deep conversations we had, all of that has become less frequent now. There’s no conflict as such, but I can sense the slow drift happening.
Even hard, I feel the same with my parents. With them, the feelings are even more complicated than with my friends. I still feel a deep sense of responsibility towards them. That hasn’t changed, but emotionally something feels different. The intensity overall is low now as compared to what I felt earlier. For the first 3 decades of my life, I had never lived away from them for more than a few days. I had never imagined my life without them and now here I am, far and away from them for many years.
During my initial months, I made it a point to call them almost every day so that they felt assured that I have not “abandoned and forgotten” them and that I am there for them. But now our phone calls have dropped significantly. Sometimes, I find myself trying to force myself to have a conversation with them over topics that are irrelevant or not important. The reason I do that is because I know that my parents are not the kind of people who have the right kind of social skills to build and maintain meaningful relationships. They are good people but they are burdened with their own insecurities, emotional baggages, social pressures, internal expectations and I know they are socially inept in a lot of ways. I don’t want them to feel lonely and abandoned and so I take the efforts as much as I can.
The most uncomfortable and uneasy feeling I have is when I find myself “not missing” them as intensely as I previously did, or when wondering what should I talk with them, or whether I should even call them or not. All of these thoughts don’t feel like the “right thoughts” to have and yet I tend to frequently have them now. It’s again a very strange realization.
Feeling disconnected
At the risk of repeating myself, I again want to say that all of these feelings are very strange and weird. Every passing day I feel more and more disconnected with my life back in India. I have started noticing the differences in mindsets, opinions, values, etc. between me and my people back in India. These were things I had never noticed back then when I was a part of that same circle. But now with distance and time, these differences have started to stand out more and more.
The idea of “going back home”
When I first moved here, I always believed this was a temporary life. That someday, we would return. This was a belief that gave me hope and provided me with the much needed rationalization I needed internally to keep my mind sane.
But now, I often tend to comfortably question that belief. I find myself asking, but why should we move back? I have built enough mental bandwidth to entertain these conflicting thoughts and play around possible what-if scenarios in my mind now.
I ask myself what are the reasons of moving back to India now? May be I am holding on to a version of my life that no longer exists? May be I have this fond idea of my life in India that I imagine would return if go back.
As much as I linger in these imaginations, I am equally aware of the reality that everyone back home will have moved on with their lives and built their own social circles, their own paths. Contexts will have have changed now. May be we won’t have the same connection with our friends and family as we once did. So I can’t help but think that if we return, we won’t be stepping back into the same life. I’ll be stepping into something new, unfamiliar in its own way.
Responsibilty, obligations, choices
One strong reason to return that I still get in my mind is my parents. As they slowly grow older, I want to be there for them. I think about their health and I like I previously mentioned, I don’t want them to feel helpless and lonely during their times of need. Even worse, I think of situations where one of them passes away and what that means for the other one left behind. However, other than moving back now I have started thinking of other options like bringing them here, arranging for dedicated home care and support for them, etc.
Overall, in this respect, the sense of responsibility still weighs heavily on me and feels like a obligatory reason for moving back. I now know that there are multiple options in front of me to deal with such a situation and that I will have to eventually and inevitably make a choice and that choice is going to matter a lot.
The downgrade
Other than the relationships, there’s one another aspect of moving back that I internally struggle to admit. Although this is more superficial but nonetheless it’s still a factor.
The thought of moving back now kind of feels like a lifestyle downgrade. It’s a thought that feels equally betraying and I find it hard to acknowledge that I am having such a thought in the first place.
Our current life here feels calmer, more stable, more predictable. When I look back at India now, I see not just familiarity but also the inherent chaos and frictions and problems that were once the normal. Having such thoughts feels wrong. It feels like I am being disloyal or ungrateful to the opportunities I have had there.
The third dimension
Right now, it’s just the two of us. Our decisions currently revolve around our lives and our goals. But what happens when we have a kid in the future? That changes the equation completely and fundamentally.
Once we have a kid, it’s no longer going to be just about the two of us or about where “I” feel at home. It’s going to open up a third dimension in our lives that we have to consider above all.
I am pretty sure having a kid will bring in a big change in my perspectives and priorities, similar to the ones I had after our marriage. If anything, I am expecting to be a even bigger than that. I will then have to not only think and care about my past generation (my parents) but also about my next generation (my kid). It will be about where our kid will grow, belong, and build their own identity.
Looking very far ahead
Then there are times when I think about very distant future times. The time when we will be in our 50s and 60s. The time when our kid has built his/her own life and ready to move ahead on their own journey.
At that point in our lives, will I regret not returning to India? Or will I feel happy and content with staying back and choosing the life we did. Will I feel a renewed pull towards my roots and will be it too later then to fully reconnect? Will I regret not being closer to my parents and not giving them the joys of seeing their next generation grow in front of them? Will I regret missing important family events and not spending enough time with my core friends and family?
Honestly, I don’t have any answers to these questions right now. Everything remains open-ended. All I know for now is that I am living the best phase of my life right now. Living our dream life together, I am grateful for the present and I am hopeful about the future which feels bright but uncertain.
And may be that’s alright. I guess that’s how life is meant to be lived. One phase at a time!
So again, where is home?
May be “home” is no longer a place but instead a phase! May be “home” is any place I get to live with the love of my life, my wife. May be “home” is something that moves with us, across countries, across times, across different versions of ourselves. May be “home” is something that I no longer have to choose now.
For now, I am learning to live happily and peacefully with the thought that it’s okay for home to be more than one place. For now, 1222 is my home where I sit and write this and that’s enough!
