Between the Worlds: Home and Away

I am writing this at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, between two worlds: India and the United States. Travel has been essential to my life between these worlds. I have been lucky enough to travel more than three million miles, perhaps considerably more, if my frequent-flyer accounts are to be believed. Those miles have taken me to many corners of the world. Yet as I sit here, I find myself thinking as much about those who stayed home as about those who traveled.

A friend once told me, “You move, you lose.” In the villages I knew, families lived among their kinfolk, often within a few miles of where they were born. There was comfort in that familiarity, and a confidence that came from knowing the land and its people. A villager who spent his whole life in one place knew its seasons, its fields, its families, and their histories. A traveler might see more places, but would he ever come to know one quite so well?

When I think of my childhood friends who stayed close to home, I remember how the days and seasons set the rhythm of their lives. There were cattle to tend, milk to collect, fields to visit, and evenings sitting with others at the village center. The seasons brought tilling, sowing, weeding, harvesting, and preparing the land all over again. It was a world of familiar routines and expectations. Those expectations could also be confining, but for a while I assumed this life would be mine too.

Travel was rare in Sowpadu. Most families had relatives in surrounding villages, and there was little reason to go farther unless someone needed to shop in Guntur or see a doctor. One neighbor was said never to have visited Guntur at all. My mother came from a distant village, which made our family practically cosmopolitan. We had relatives thirty miles away!

I remember going with her to Nekkallu, her family village. In the rainy season we would walk a long way toward Guntur and wait for the bus. She would buy me a “cool drink,” which she considered a remedy for the heat. Sometimes my uncles sent a bullock cart to meet us at the bus stand in a neighboring village. Once, when a great-uncle died, we walked three miles through the mud at night to reach Nekkallu. When I could no longer walk, my father carried me on his shoulders. Those journeys were adventures to me.

I was twelve when I joined the residential school at Tadikonda. For the first time, I was living away from home by myself. A week later, after the initial excitement had worn off, I found myself in the park next to our dormitory. It had flowers, lawns, and benches–the sort of place I had never seen in our village. Suddenly that beautiful, unfamiliar place seemed to represent my future.

I would study, go to college, get a job, and live somewhere far away. Sowpadu would never again be my home in quite the same way. I would move away from my parents, away from the world I knew, and away from childhood. I sat down and cried in that beautiful park.

A few years later, I ranked 86th in the JEE, 13th in South India. There were only fourteen seats in computer science at IIT Madras. I worried that a couple of candidates from elsewhere might push me out of my first choice, so I put IIT Delhi second. I convinced myself that I would end up in Delhi and told everyone I was going there for my B.Tech.

During the summer holidays, I visited a relative near Amaravati. A neighbor heard that I was going to Delhi and asked what people ate there. “Mostly roti, I suppose,” I said. He looked at me with pity. “Ayyo! I thought you were doing well. Even with all this education, you don’t get rice!”

Of course, you move, you lose.

My father, even after moving to Guntur, often returned to Sowpadu. He knew how to live there: how to be useful, how to be neighborly, and how to be himself. I imagine the land where he had spent so much of his life spoke to him in a way no other place could. As he was dying, he wanted to see his old friends from the village once more. Many came to visit him.

When I return to Sowpadu, I am partly a visitor. When I meet friends who stayed behind, we can slip back into old times for a day or two. But education, distance, and the intervening years have taken us along different paths. Except for my close family, there is hardly anyone who has known me through all the stages of my life.

Even as I built my life in America, it often felt temporary. I love the places where I have lived, but they do not speak to me as Sowpadu spoke to my father. My friends are scattered from New York to California. Shared work, education, ambitions, and ways of looking at the world have brought us together. But we did not grow up together.

I think of spending time with college students in Kiruna, above the Arctic Circle; of being stranded in Singapore while a typhoon disrupted travel in Japan; of staying in a historic royal house in Britain, a student dormitory in Copenhagen, and a hunting lodge in South Africa. But the memories that return most readily have little to do with the accommodations.

Tennyson wrote in Ulysses:

I am a part of all that I have met;

One New Year’s Eve, I was stranded in Heidelberg. A friend I had gone to visit had a concert in Munich. She arranged a shared ride for me, but it fell through at the last minute. I was alone in a dormitory, reading Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, and beginning to feel sorry for myself. Then I came across a group cooking together, led by Klaus, who was blind. I told them how I had ended up alone in Heidelberg, and they welcomed me in: Petra from South America, Michelle from France, and Joe from California. We ate, talked, and went dancing until the early hours. I never expected to see any of them again. Yet that evening they felt like close friends, as though we were members of the same species who had unexpectedly found one another on a strange planet.

During my IIT years, I took a train to Bhilai to visit my brother. In my compartment was a family: father, mother, son, and daughter. The son, studying for his B.Com., wanted to practice English with me. We soon discovered that my broken Hindi worked better. For much of the journey I was one of the family, sharing their food and whatever the father bought along the way. Before we parted, we exchanged addresses.

A month later, a letter arrived at IIT, written in Hindi. It was an ordinary letter asking about my health and studies. I struggled to answer in Hindi and eventually gave up. I have long since lost the letter, but not the memory of that family.

On another flight, I sat with an older woman and a young bride coming from Iran to join her husband in America. The young woman was afraid that Americans hated Muslims. I found myself reassuring her that America was also full of ordinary, kind people who welcomed newcomers. When we landed in Detroit, she was taken into enhanced immigration processing. I never saw her again. I hoped that she found her way home.

There is a strange intimacy among fellow travelers. Sometimes people tell a stranger things they would hesitate to tell a neighbor. Perhaps it helps that neither person expects to be part of the other’s life afterward.

In South Africa, a woman of Indian origin who had attended my conference talk offered to show me the city and the mountains. As we walked on Table Mountain, she told me about growing up under apartheid. Her family had lost land to the government. Her brother had married a white woman, and their father had become estranged from him, never meeting his two grandchildren. She had never met her sister-in-law.

She also spoke of how people in her community had relied on one another to survive segregation, and how some of those bonds had weakened in the years since apartheid ended. I had met her only that day. By evening, I knew stories about her family that some acquaintances might never hear.

Strangers can become companions just as quickly when travel goes wrong. A cancelled Air India flight once left me at Chicago O’Hare for most of a day with a student returning to Calcutta to propose to his girlfriend, a daughter-in-law going to meet her in-laws in Gujarat, and an IT worker returning to Delhi. By the end, we were talking as though an invitation to the student’s wedding were only natural– assuming the proposal went well.

Meanwhile, the village I left has changed. People who once rarely ventured beyond Guntur now see distant places and unfamiliar lives on their phones. My childhood friends have changed too. Many moved to Guntur, the nearest urban center, where they carried their old relationships with them. They visit one another for festivals and gather for weddings, funerals, and all the celebrations in between. When I return, they come to see me as well. The land may be different, but the people are the same; the connections are as old as the land.

I left home when I was twelve. Since then, I have made friends, built a family, and lived in places that boy in Tadikonda could scarcely have imagined. I sometimes envy the continuity my childhood friends have kept. I would not give up the people I met along the way, either.

The best part of travel? Going home. Where is home? For my father, it was the soil of Sowpadu. For me, it was the perpetual journey of learning.

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