I usually consider it a victory if I manage to get off an international flight without hating all mankind. On this (forgiving!) scale, my flight back to India from the US was almost successful, but marred by two incredibly irritating factors:
1) The extremely large man seated immediately next to me. He was very sweet, and very polite, and it's not his fault that his parents were giants and that the people who manufacture airplane seats expect all of us to be as minute and limber as Chinese gymnasts. HOWEVER! None of this changes the fact that as the hours wore agonizingly on, he kept encroaching further and further into my seat space, leaving me to resort to the time-honored and only slightly passive-aggressive defense maneuver of poking him until he retreated, all the while pretending to be totally absorbed in my inflight movie.
2) The incredibly awful, entertaining debacle in the row in front of me. Technically, this row was supposed to be shared by three women, but let me just say that the Second Triumvirate shared the Roman Republic with more camaraderie and goodwill than these women managed with these three seats. At one point, a flight attendant had to adjudicate their dispute, at another point, one woman hissed to the other "you should be ashamed of yourself." The flight attendant, who overheard this remark, immediately chimed in with a tired, "Please don't guilt other passengers." The hisser then resorted to referring to the third woman as "the stupid woman", making loud remarks like, "the stupid woman has gone to the bathroom again." Needless to say, the rest of us passengers were left quaking at what incredibly inane thing the stupid woman would do next - perhaps eat a meal? Take a nap?
Also, at one point I woke up to find one of the women going through the contents of my purse, although she claimed it fell over inflight.
Needless to say, I was almost happy to disembark in the humid air of Delhi. These days, every trip back to the United States is more fraught and more rewarding that it used to be. At one point, people wondered why I moved to Delhi, now they wonder why the heck I'm still there. When I first moved to India, I was still in that period of life when my future seemed a bit far off; that is no longer the case. The future is here, there is no buffer.
There is absolutely nothing about India that bothers me except for the fact that it's clearly not the United States. I'm not trying to be cute. I'm just saying that I struggle with identity and origin, and the longer I live outside the US the more muddled the answers I give seem to become. If nobody ever asked me "why did you move to Delhi" again, it would still be a question I've answered a few times too many. I mean, it's not as if I've chosen to live on the moon, after all.
I'm reminded of the girl who asked me, nose politely crinkled, if there was a reason I was in India, her tone implying perhaps I'd been banished or was somehow invisibly disfigured. This attitude, alas, prevails among Indians too. There is an undeniable perception that India is still second-class, not the place anyone with options would choose to be, and that saddens me and complicates my narrative as well.
But these questions are still much easier to answer than those posed by friends and family. I've said this before, but living abroad has given me the opportunity to think about how we form relationships; what draws us together, what constitutes a bond. Deep, real relationships may be preserved in absence but they can only be built by our presence. I haven't been present in the US for a long time, and maybe I'm also afraid that the people I care about will soon give up hope and move on, substitute me with others, that I'll lose the ability to call either of these countries my home.
1) The extremely large man seated immediately next to me. He was very sweet, and very polite, and it's not his fault that his parents were giants and that the people who manufacture airplane seats expect all of us to be as minute and limber as Chinese gymnasts. HOWEVER! None of this changes the fact that as the hours wore agonizingly on, he kept encroaching further and further into my seat space, leaving me to resort to the time-honored and only slightly passive-aggressive defense maneuver of poking him until he retreated, all the while pretending to be totally absorbed in my inflight movie.
2) The incredibly awful, entertaining debacle in the row in front of me. Technically, this row was supposed to be shared by three women, but let me just say that the Second Triumvirate shared the Roman Republic with more camaraderie and goodwill than these women managed with these three seats. At one point, a flight attendant had to adjudicate their dispute, at another point, one woman hissed to the other "you should be ashamed of yourself." The flight attendant, who overheard this remark, immediately chimed in with a tired, "Please don't guilt other passengers." The hisser then resorted to referring to the third woman as "the stupid woman", making loud remarks like, "the stupid woman has gone to the bathroom again." Needless to say, the rest of us passengers were left quaking at what incredibly inane thing the stupid woman would do next - perhaps eat a meal? Take a nap?
Also, at one point I woke up to find one of the women going through the contents of my purse, although she claimed it fell over inflight.
Needless to say, I was almost happy to disembark in the humid air of Delhi. These days, every trip back to the United States is more fraught and more rewarding that it used to be. At one point, people wondered why I moved to Delhi, now they wonder why the heck I'm still there. When I first moved to India, I was still in that period of life when my future seemed a bit far off; that is no longer the case. The future is here, there is no buffer.
There is absolutely nothing about India that bothers me except for the fact that it's clearly not the United States. I'm not trying to be cute. I'm just saying that I struggle with identity and origin, and the longer I live outside the US the more muddled the answers I give seem to become. If nobody ever asked me "why did you move to Delhi" again, it would still be a question I've answered a few times too many. I mean, it's not as if I've chosen to live on the moon, after all.
I'm reminded of the girl who asked me, nose politely crinkled, if there was a reason I was in India, her tone implying perhaps I'd been banished or was somehow invisibly disfigured. This attitude, alas, prevails among Indians too. There is an undeniable perception that India is still second-class, not the place anyone with options would choose to be, and that saddens me and complicates my narrative as well.
But these questions are still much easier to answer than those posed by friends and family. I've said this before, but living abroad has given me the opportunity to think about how we form relationships; what draws us together, what constitutes a bond. Deep, real relationships may be preserved in absence but they can only be built by our presence. I haven't been present in the US for a long time, and maybe I'm also afraid that the people I care about will soon give up hope and move on, substitute me with others, that I'll lose the ability to call either of these countries my home.
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