Coming home

Things have changed and you learn to get used to what you see. I remember when I was driving from JFK to my college, I felt stunned as I looked around at the giant buildings filled will giant merchandise being sold by giant salesmen. The roads were wide and the cars were fast and the driver spoke into his radio transmitter, acknowledging the traffic on Route 9, instead of aiming a quick blob of spittle at the perfect little bush planted along the highway by perfect men in their perfect uniforms. Perhaps this is the difference between that faraway first world and our euphemistically christened developing world 8211; perfection. Every blade of grass grew in my college is allowed one uniform height, making me miss the wild grass and weeds growing in careless abandon in the field near my house, conveniently hiding the early-morning pilgrims from the slum nearby.

But now I am back, and suddenly I can8217;t ignore those pilgrims and their foul stench, I can8217;t seem to appreciate the beauty of the black gleaming muscled bodies of the shirtless labourers anymore, and I can8217;t seem to stop wondering how my maid manages her brood of six girls and two boys and one alcoholic husband.

And now I understand why people don8217;t come back. It8217;s not the dirt or the filth, or the heat or even the doddering economy which repels them, it is the immunity to imperfection which dies when not nurtured. I remember as a child I used to play happily on the design of a threadbare carpet at the bank for hours while my mother waited patiently for the inching line to move forward and the fat men behind the desk to finish settling a paan between their stained teeth. But now I know about the gleaming ATMs and the well-dressed tellers and the beautiful tapestry on the walls of the bank in my town there, and the faded pattern on the floor doesn8217;t thrill me anymore, it saddens me.

I love my country. I would blindly give my life for it because it is my home and I can8217;t be happy anywhere else. I can ride the spotless highways of America and buy their spotless merchandise from their gleaming towering malls but they won8217;t be mine, all mine, like the cracked gravel pathway outside my school is, like the narrow, truck-laden Mumbai-Pune highway is.

But now I can understand what motivates people to give up the cracked gravel and the frustrating traffic. Life is easier there, life is convenient there where a computer and a microwave can be a baby-sitter and two frozen packets dinner. Work is fulfilling there, with constant rewards which are real, not illusions and sleep often comes more easily with the knowledge that the air-conditioner will not succumb to load-shedding in the middle of the night, dragging you back into a sweating, still night.

Now when someone prophesies glumly that I will never come back, I don8217;t rush to tell them indignantly that I will, that that is a silly attitude to have and there is nothing that should keep one from one8217;s own country8230; I nod and accede. They won8217;t change their mind anyway. After all, they8217;ve seen it all a thousand times before, heard a thousand promises before. But now I understand why those thousand people before me didn8217;t keep their promise, didn8217;t come back to substantiate their vows. And I don8217;t condemn now as I used to. Because now I realise that it takes a lot to give up one8217;s motherland. Perhaps even more than it takes to come back to it.