The Corner of Truth and Lies

That somewhat grand title addresses this question. I've been in India for nearly a year, and people keep asking me if I miss the United States.

"No!" I heartily reply. Friends, I confess, this is a lie. Of course I miss the United States. I miss it in my bones.

What is it like to miss home? I won't bore you with descriptions. I'll say that yesterday afternoon I spent three hours flipping through the "Sound and the Fury" at the American Center library, because reading William Faulkner reminded me of high school. On the Fourth of July, Halloween and Thanksgiving, I spent hours on the Internet looking at pictures of flags, costumes and turkeys. Previously awful memories - mass transit, high school prom - assumed the rosy glow of retrospect. (My nostalgia took more bizarre forms too - I developed a KFC fixation.)

Why don't I just tell people all this? So many reasons. The first is that to think of home makes homesickness more unbearable. Saying 'no' is a lot easier emotionally than saying 'yes and here's why...' But the bigger reason is because it's impossible to answer a question like this. How can I explain in words that I miss the past, and that in particular I miss specific moments of it? That I miss nostalgia itself, because I get so few opportunities to indulge in it here, where everything I come across is new to me?

Ok, I'm being too fancy. I don't tell Indians that I miss the United States because I know they'll judge me. "She misses clean roads and money and Starbucks, the superficial imperialist whinger," they'll think. Ok, they're right. I miss Starbucks, sometimes. Not because it's better than Cafe Coffee Day, but because like millions of tired commuters and cool college kids and former baristas, Starbucks was in a million ways mine. (I miss clean roads for their own sake, though)

I promised myself I would avoid odious comparisons between these two countries, ever since I saw MItra Kalita's blog on Livemint about how she missed home. People made fun of her, and they had a point. Why should Indians, full of self-confidence for the first time since Nehru donned his famous jacket, give a damn? These types of reflections, no matter how well-intentioned, don't play well on the other side of a cultural divide.

Ok, you're thinking. This is all great. So if you miss home so much, why don't you just come back??

Here's the truly messed-up part of it all: that won't solve my problem. I thought that by coming to India I would finally answer the question of 'where do I belong.' I haven't - in fact, the answer becomes more obscure every day. And maybe the answer doesn't matter. Maybe we don't have to "belong" - whatever that means - anywhere.

If I went home today, tomorrow I would sit on the DC Metro and feel grateful that the train was clean and on time and took me into Washington DC, city that I love so dearly and know so well. It is a part of me. And at the same time I'd feel miserable that I wasn't sitting in an auto rickshaw breathing the black particulates of Delhi. Which are also, perhaps less fortuitously, a part of me.

What does that make me? An idiot? Probably. It means I can't leave India yet. I don't know why, perhaps because this country is still too exciting, and I can't pass that up. (It is exciting, even objectively, ask anyone who lives here.)

Do I miss home? Yes. But in another way, I am home, even now.