I am an NRI now, the dhobi ka kutta
Just before I sat down to write this article, I slathered Parachute coconut oil all over my parched face, the only efficacious remedy for my chronic dry skin in California. This sort of grease-fest in a humid place like Mumbai, my home for over three and a half decades, would be unthinkable.
“So, what’s it like, living in America?” my friends and family asked me, after casually observing how much weight I had gained since they last saw me around 12 months ago.
This was my first trip back home since I left India a year ago, and I didn’t know where to begin.
I had felt nothing like Princess Jasmine on a magic carpet singing “A whole new world..”, as I struggled to adjust to life in the U.S. So when my flight touched the tarmac at Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport after 12 long months, I felt I could finally breathe again. And then, as soon as I deboarded, Mumbai’s unhealthy AQI greeted me and I had my first NRI moment.
Now, that acronym is more than just slang to berate foreign-returned desis who walk around with Bisleri bottles in hand. It is formal nomenclature used by the Indian banking system to classify Indians who have lived outside India for over six months of a given financial year. I’m a cross between a non-resident alien in America and a non-resident Indian back home.
I am now officially a newly minted dhobi ka kutta, na ghar ka na ghaat ka.
Indians are desperate to get out. Or not
While in Mumbai, I went to watch Rajkumar Hirani’s Dunki at an overpriced PVR theater. The movie is about a bunch of visa-starved, small-town Punjabis, desperate enough to take the illegal and dangerous — aka ‘donkey’ — route to England, via Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey. I found the experience cinematically underwhelming, but it really made me think about how Indians — proverbially and literally, as is the case in the movie — die to go abroad.
However, I noticed among my younger friends and relatives in India that unlike their counterparts from previous generations, they were not starry-eyed about that friend or cousin who went abroad. In the era of social media memes — especially of the “what my friends think I’m doing versus what I’m actually doing” kind — there’s really nowhere to hide. No one seems to fantasize that I’m chilling on a yacht under the Golden Gate Bridge. Everyone knows I’m doing jhadu-pocha. Many in my friends’ circle think my life in California is a downgraded version of the one I had in Mumbai.
To be fair, the decision to leave India has a lot to do with one’s class, caste, religion, education, level of oppression faced in society, and one’s station in life, either professional or personal. Then there’s the hope that we are leaving for better education, more opportunities, amazing salaries, corruption-free systems, the whole nine yards. For those keen to escape, dreams and wings await.
I am not asking why we do it. The answer to that may be complicated and layered. This essay is not about those sorts of big, serious things. It’s more about the little things that add up and start making our lived experience in America feel like a desi version of the Faustian bargain.
Partly to blame is our tendency to compare the worst of India with the best of the U.S., and vice versa when we feel homesick. We curse the endless traffic jams in Indian cities when compared with the relative order of suburban American streets. Then again, we miss the warmth of Indian hospitality when faced with a more detached form of social life in America; I can’t imagine inviting myself to or arriving unannounced at someone’s house, something we do often and without a second thought in India. Those who’ve built social networks over generations in the U.S. may disagree, but as a new immigrant the difference is hard to overlook.
Letting go of the familiar for the new
But not all comparisons are about declaring what’s better as much as they are about deciding what parts of the familiar we’re okay letting go of.
And who knows this better than a journalist oscillating between the AP Stylebook and the Oxford comma? My feelings towards MM/DD/YYYY went from passionate frustration to detached amusement to quiet resignation. I’m sure healthy acceptance is around the corner. There are less stages involved in getting over a bad breakup.
It was months after brandishing my byline in Bay Area newspapers that I started typing “color” without having to delete the “u”, and “organization” without having to switch out the familiar “s” with a “z”. I still say “zed” and not “zee”, though. And I still speak centigrade, so I picture the devil stirring hellfires every time someone says it’s 70 degrees.
On a more entertaining note, my adjustment process includes making a list of out-of-sync words: match versus game, signal versus light, footpath versus sidewalk, dustbin versus trash can, petrol pump versus gas station, torch versus flashlight, lorry versus truck, dickie and bonnet versus boot and hood, glasses versus spectacles, sunglasses versus goggles …although, I suspect the last two have more to do with me being a Marathi aji bai at heart than a new Indian immigrant in the U.S.
Back home…
Of all things diaspora, however, I find the usage of the phrase “back home” the most endearing. Not a day goes by without me either saying it or hearing it.
“Back home we drive on the other side of the road.”
“Most people speak at least three languages back home.”
“I’m going back home around November.”
The best part is, even people who have spent more than half their lives stateside, many of them with American passports, still refer to India as “back home”. It’s the latest addition to my vocabulary too.
Negotiating the American idiom is an ongoing process, one, I trust, I may come to enjoy.
It is true that moving to the United States today is not as extreme a decision as it was back in the ’80s, when Pankaj Udhas serenaded sons of the soil back to their motherland with his hit song Chitthi Aayi Hai (Naam, 1986). In the age of WhatsApp and FaceTime, no one is sitting by the landline waiting for me to call. But it is also true that I feel like a bit of a hoodwinker each time I finish shopping for groceries in Sunnyvale, get behind the wheel and allow Google Maps to think it’s taking me home.
Okay, wrapping this up lest I grease my keyboard with coconut oil.