So far, one of the strangest experiences of being an ex-pat
is knowing the future. We know that
sometime in 2014 or early 2015 we are going to leave Bangalore and move back to
St. Paul. As most of you know, Andi and
I have done our fair share of moving. But through the years all of our homes have
been open-ended: I never knew how long I
would stay in Boston, and we never knew how long we would be in Claremont or
Wilmington. Even in St. Paul, which we
so quickly fell in love with and even more so now consider home, we always had
the thought in the back of our heads, “Where next?” But in each of these homes this movement was
always a hypothetical, a possibility, an open horizon that was thought about,
dreamt about, and explored, and at some point acted on, but never known until
the decision was made. Now we know: we
are leaving Bangalore in two-plus years.
So how do you make a home of a place you know you are going
to leave? Of course, to even ask this
question is to assume that home is a time and not just a place. Home is a place, yes; a certain familiarity
of location, of geography, of memories good and bad, of favorite restaurants
and bookstores and yarn shops, of great neighborhoods and favorite runs and friendly streets to walk, of
sacred sites that are filled with friends and family and love. So yes, home is a place.
But I am also starting to wonder and worry that a place can
become home only against an open horizon.
Which is, to be sure, very different than saying that it takes a long
time for home to appear. I, for one, but
I think Andi as well, fell in love with St. Paul the moment we turned the
corner on Lincoln Ave. on that cold and snowy New Year’s Eve. In an instant St. Paul became home, became
the site of our familiarity. But I do
wonder if that was able to happen only because our future in St. Paul was
open. All we knew was that we could
survive for about three months on our savings account. We hadn’t even seen our apartment yet, and
had no idea what we would do in the Cities, work or otherwise. The place was open to become home because the
time of that place was (and still is) open.
So what is the connection between home and time? I ask this, as you might have already
guessed, because Bangalore is not (yet) home.
It is amazing. I am, as I type
this, as excited about a place as I ever have been.
The experiences that we will have over these next few years will be
beyond anything we can imagine; we will be poked and prodded and pushed to
become people that we cannot even imagine ourselves as now; we will meet ideas
and sites and people that will be absolutely singular in their own power; we
will experience a lifetime in two years.
But we will have an adventure and not a home.
All of this might simply be due to the fact that the
transition here is greater than any I have experienced before, and is taking a bit
longer than I would hope; we still don’t have our cable quite right; I haven’t adjusted to the lack of transportation freedom that comes with having a
driver; I still don’t know the difference between a crore and a lakh. OK, maybe.
But, with as much honesty as I can muster, I am as much of a stranger
here as I was in Wilmington, NC. Yes,
the cultural distance is greater here, but there is also a welcome here that I never
experienced in Wilmington.[i] Which is also to say that I am such an
introvert that I am a stranger everywhere.
Or, to try one last time, familiarity is a feeling and not yet a
knowledge.
So I come back to time, to the temporality of place. I am no closer to knowing the connection - how is it that time can open a place to become a home? But
I think that’s it: home is the place of our future.
[i]
This is, of course, to ignore the slightly obvious problem of communication:
this is the first time I have tried to make a home in a place where I couldn’t
communicate freely. But
except for Airtel customer service, language has not been a problem. In many ways, communication has become richer
to the extent that by necessity it has become much more physical: I communicate
now as much with my body as I do with words, and I am beginning to listen with an
embodiment that verges on incorporation rather than hearing. So although communication is difficult, I am not sure it is a barrier to being here.
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