On Being Far From Home

There is a particular moment that happens to people who have lived far from where they grew up for a long time. You are at a dinner table, or on the phone with your parents, and you reach for a word or a reference and you realize the other person does not have the same frame of reference for it. Not because they are uninformed — because the shared context that you once assumed now has gaps in it.

This is not loneliness exactly. It is something quieter. A recognition that two versions of you have been accumulating experiences separately, and the gap between them grows wider with time.

I have lived outside India for most of my adult life. The career opportunities, the professional networks, the daily routines — all of it is here. The version of me that navigates this world is fluent in it. The version of me that is from somewhere else watches all of it with a slight double consciousness, noticing the places where the cultural assumptions differ.

Both versions are real. Neither is more authentic than the other.

What I have noticed, after enough years, is that the grief of distance becomes less about missing specific places and more about missing specific people. You do not grieve the geography — you grieve the ordinary moments that happen without you. Your parents navigating getting older without you in the room. Siblings' children growing up in photographs. The small conversations that don't happen because the time zone difference makes calling inconvenient.

There is no resolution to this. You make choices; the choices have costs; you learn to carry the costs.

What helps, I think, is not trying to resolve the double consciousness but to be honest about it. The immigrant experience — or the long-term expat experience, or whatever you call it when home has become a complicated concept — is not a problem to be solved. It is a condition to be understood.

I am more comfortable now with the idea that I am from multiple places, that both of them are real, and that the gap between them is part of my experience rather than a failure to integrate or a failure to stay connected.

When people ask where I am from, I give them the simple answer. It is not wrong. It is just incomplete.

The complete answer would take considerably longer, and most conversations do not have room for it.