Home: An Inquiry

In April of 2022 my wife and I were on our honeymoon in Peru. Thinking it criminal to be so close to a geographical ecosystem like the Amazon rainforest and not go, we made it our first stop (before moving on to the Greatest Hits of the the Inca Trail and Machu Picchu). We stayed at a lovely eco-lodge called Posada Amazonas, not too far from the Bolivian border. Unlike most tourism in urban centers where a traveling unit can go about their day in their isolated bubble, living in the middle of a rainforest requires mingling with your co-residents. You know, for Man vs Wild reasons. On the very first day, we met our temporary commune - the honeymooning couple in me and my wife, three Canadian-Indian college friends on their “boy’s trip” and a British family (husband, wife and three children all under 10).

Built to be immersive in nature and without the comforts of modern life - electricity available only between 4-7am and 5-8pm - you get to know your fellow travelers as you buy each other pisco sours at the end of your long days in the wilderness together. John, the British dad, saw me reading Shoe Dog one afternoon and told me how much he loved that book too. He told me it got him back into running. I asked him how long he’d lived in London for and he said since he came there to study Economics at 18. That’s where he met his now wife. He asked me what my wife did and I told him she was still exploring but hoped to do something in the food space - I mentioned we were both inspired by Asma Khan’s story with The Darjeeling Express. He told me he had loved eating there and funnily enough was taught by Asma Khan’s husband who was an Economics professor at the University of London!

During our afternoon breaks when I was feeling inspired by Phil Knight, John would preside over chess matches between his 9-year old daughter and 6-year old son. Very subtly, I saw him teach them patience and sportsmanship - how to make calculated moves but also how to deal with the frustration of a loss. I learned that John was Italian and his wife Polish. I noticed him giving them instructions in Italian while they’d respond in English. Chandan and I were surprised and impressed in equal measure that John was brave enough to bring a 9, 6 and 3 year old to the middle of the jungle where most other parents we know would think a hundred times before taking their kids’ iPads away! In fact, every parenting act we saw from them showed immense faith in their children instead of mollycoddling them to ineptitude.

I got to learn from John not only about his entrepreneurial journey, something I aspired to at that point in my life, but also how he thought about raising his children. I pointed out to him that it seemed like the children understood both Italian and Polish but responded in English? He said, “That’s just how it goes, you know? Both, Karolina and I are Polish and Italian, but we’ve lived in London since we were 18. We both want our kids to have associations with their lineage but they’ve only ever seen life in London so it’s confusing for them, especially at this age. I mean, it’s confusing for us. I think I’m Italian but am I Italian? I haven’t lived in Italy in over 25 years. So am I Italian or am I English? If the idea of home is confusing for me, imagine what it must be like for them? But that’s also the beauty of it all, isn’t it?” I have to admit, my memory fails me whether John said innit or not.

At that time, I had been living in the US for a little over ten years, not quite over the “half my life” hump that John was past, but his words still resonated. What was home for me? The obvious answer was, and always will be, Ranchi. It’s where I grew up in my ancestral home - the home my grandfather built after his family moved from Pakistan post-partition, in the same home that my father grew up in. My brother and I attended the same school my father attended, grew up with friends whose parents were friends with mine from the generation before. My grandmother packed my lunch every morning and my grandfather dropped me off at the bus stop on his Vespa. When a lot of my friends were being sent off to boarding school, my mother insisted that I stay “home” until college. “Why send away my child at 10 when I know he’s going to leave at 18,” is what she used to say. “Why shorten his attachment to us and this house?” If places have memory, Ranchi was my cornerstone.

In talking to John, I recalled my first year out of college: anxiously awaiting the H-1B lottery. I made consolations in my mind about what should happen in case I don’t get picked. The initial pull for staying in the US was only to get an ROI on the massive tuition bill I’d racked up for my parents. My Aunt and Uncle, who had lived in New York for almost 25 years at that point, thought my line of reasoning was a schtick. Anytime I was asked whether I still enjoyed my trips back to India, I said “Yes, and I’ll happily move back any day;” to which they’d say, “That’s what we used to say 15 years ago. Look where we are now.” Their version of “yeah, right!”

As hopeful as I was that I would get picked in one of my three tries - the lottery not exactly The Hunger Games that it would become later - I also thought it foolish to not think of contingencies.

At one point I interviewed with a company based in Berlin just to prove to myself that I could get a job anywhere in the world and survive across borders. I used to work for Expedia at the time and I thought, “Expedia would just send me to Canada” or Dublin or London or Tokyo or any of the many offices they had around the world - trying to deal with the double trouble of impostor syndrome and immigration anxiety. So while I considered this German opportunity, I knew my pay in the US compared to a salary in any other country felt like a huge downgrade. But it was a compromise I was willing to make as collateral to temporal living in a country with a near-non-existent path to immigration (calculations of getting a Green Card via a job for Indian Passport holders range from 20-150 years). With each passing year in the US though, I’d calculate when my in-hand savings would outgrow the total cost of tuition for my four years of college. Then I got picked in the lottery.

Beyond the immigration bureaucracy of it all and the ZIRP-era tech salaries that I was chasing, the US scratched a cultural itch that was extremely satisfying. I had grown up on a steady diet of Western pop-culture. How that happened to come about in a small town like Ranchi I have no idea (even India’s cities follow a caste system of sorts where we label them Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3 and so on. Ranchi was, at the time, maybe a Tier 3 city with ambitions of getting to Tier 2 someday. The echelons of Tier 1 were reserved for the metropolitan Delhis and Mumbais and Bangalores of the world). Tier 3 cities by definition, and stereotype, had less cultural density than the Tier 1s. But here I was familiar with the intricacies of the drug trade in Albuquerque, New Mexico (Breaking Bad) or the inner workings of a paper company in Scranton, Pennsylvania (The Office). My dream at one point in life was to see Coldplay perform Fix You live but Coldplay didn’t tour Ranchi. Heck, they didn’t even tour India. But they toured through every state in the US! When I found myself living in Seattle after college, I was in awe of the fact that I was in Nirvana’s hometown. Places that felt imagined in my childhood suddenly became real. They evolved from an idea to fruition just because I existed in this physical reality now.

Omar El Akkad wrote of a similar experience in his book when he moved from Qatar to Canada: “It marked a small parcel of rootedness in those years when the West transformed from a thing on film and television to the place where, more likely than not, I’d live out the rest of my life.”

In 2019, despite the 50-year wait for approval, my Green Card application was at least filed so I could get into the unlimited-H1-renewals-until-we-process-your-application phase of my life. Yay to more “stability.” All this while, the friendships here deepened, while the friendships back home went on autopilot - only rekindling when I’d be back for my biannual two weeks. Those two weeks increasingly felt like “so, what did I miss in the last 24 weeks?” followed by “okay, see you again in 24!” Ranchi still had the warmth I would expect from home, largely anchored by my parents still living there, and the very few friends who hadn’t left the city after their college time was over. But, 48 out of the 52 weeks in a year I lived in the US. So, where was home?

That Fall of 2019, my brother moved to the US for his undergrad. Then one of my cousins. Then almost every cousin on my dad’s side of the family. Then, as recently as last October, almost every cousin on my mom’s side of the family has also moved here. A generational exodus. My grandparents would visit and stay with my Uncle for a few months every summer. My parents started visiting almost every year for about a month. The people who anchored the places I called home suddenly more mobile than ever. Did “home” move with them? It felt like home in their presence at least.

As more time passed the weight of the question “would you still move back to India?” increased. What does it mean to be able to sustain the same lifestyle in a country I know through annual four-week-vignettes? I think I have an idea of what it means but I’m delusional if I think I have the whole picture. It’s like claiming that I watched a documentary on free soloing, therefore, I know how to climb. If I moved back, density of opportunities would only exist in Tier 1s, so I’d likely live in a Delhi or Bangalore, and not Ranchi, but yes India. So is the bucket of India “home”?

The truth is, the answer to the question “would I move back” is a default yes. The willingness to move back was a lot higher before I had been in the US for a decade. Before I was married, before I had grown in my career, before we bought a home here. In the early days, the willingness was even tied to opportunity - I’d move back if the right thing came up (distinction: not an opportunity I was necessarily chasing down). Now the willingness is more tied to circumstance - in case the visa renewal doesn’t go through, or a governmental policy changes, or (and we’ve always known this) if my parents’ health needs attention, which by God’s grace they’re very healthy today - knock-on-wood-tap-my-head-and-hop-on-one-leg-looking-at-the-sky.

And what about my parents? Where is home for them? They’ve lived in the same house and same city their whole life, but their children now live 8000 miles away from them. I know home for them is Ranchi but when they visit, I know home is also with us. So does home need to be a singular, physical entity or should we just be happy that this is the nicest problem one has to contend with - to call multiple places in the world “home”? An absolute privilege in a world where the displacement of people and communities through no fault of their own is a sadly acceptable norm.

John didn’t hear this entire inner monologue from me but we did muse together the similarities of our experience despite coming from opposite sides of the world to somehow be convening in the middle of a rainforest. As John and I exchanged emails to stay in touch, I asked him whether he spelled his name John or Jon and he said, “actually it’s spelled Gian. G-I-A-N” which left me gobsmacked for a minute. “Gian, why didn’t you correct me this whole time? Was I saying it wrong?” and he said, “I respond to both now, John is just easier for people to grasp when they hear it and it’s close enough.” Gian’s name, to me, now an even clearer reflection of his home.