Home

Moving to Winnipeg, for a number of reasons, has been something unlike I've ever experienced before. I guess it's part and parcel of the growing up process. One common notion of growing up is to be tough or strong. Thus far, I've resisted showing any emotion to what I have now come to realize, cherish, and miss as home. My eight month stint in Europe and India was definitely a test run for leaving home for so long; I've only been away from home, New York, familiarity for two or three month stretches to Andhra until that point.

New York, of course, is home. I think a few precise things, especially recent events, have been instrumental in congealing this sentiment of home to me. Of course, I was born in the Bronx and raised in Queens and Long Island. For as long as I can remember, New York has been a default for me. And default doesn't really have a designation: as home, foreign, or anything. I suppose that's why I didn't really experience this sentiment of home until very recently.

I have been going to Andhra since I was little, but even then, a longing for home really wasn't present in my consciousness. I do remember one time after coming back from Andhra that I particularly savored the New York City tap water, but such moments were far and few in between. A family friend from Madras reminded me a few years ago how much I staked claim to my American-ness when I visited in 1997. This incident, unlike the water one, didn't leave such a lasting impression. In fact, I forgot about it only until I was reminded of it.

Andhra, I've come to realize, is not some far away distant land that is half way across the earth. I'm sure others have written about this, but Euclidean distance ceases to matter much when we start talking about places (as opposed to spaces). Of course, it has the material effect of creating a 24 hour flight journey to actually get to Andhra from New York, but other than that, I don't think of Andhra as being some 10,000 odd miles away. New York is home. Andhra is where I go regularly. I've been to Andhra, specifically Hyderabad, Visakhapatnam, Bobbili, Saluru, and Bangaramma Peta, more times than Washington D.C. or Boston. To me, Andhra is definitely a place that is not home, but it is also a place that is not foreign.

I think it was going to study in London that really did the trick for me. Maybe I experienced homesickness then because I knew in my mind that I was going to be away from home so long. It was an up and down sort of thing. I missed New York at first, didn't miss it later, missed it again. I was experiencing new things, so the distractions were welcome. And even though London is a lot like New York, I suppose I missed the people the most - my friends and my family (chosen and blood). Seeing my nuclear, New York family for my sister's wedding at the mid-point of the stint was definitely very helpful. Coming to India, I was familiar turf but I soon realized that I was away from home. By the end of it, I missed New York style pizza and bagels a lot, among other things. (Thankfully my internship in the coming year provided me with a lot of both!)

Going to college in New York and studying what I studied in college definitely factored into New York becoming home for me. Not only did I spend the quintessential formative years in New York, I was also able to study the city and experience it in as much entirety as possible. I grew to have some ownership and attachment over New York. I had, have a stake in it like I've never before. In the physical sense, I think mobility really helped me: I took the subway and buses everywhere and drove all over the tri-state area. Covering that ground had a very real, tangible effect on my sense of home. Perhaps every mile I traveled and every moment I experienced, I poured a little bit of myself into the city.

This is also the period of time when I became much closer to my mother. We began to connect on a higher level, in my opinion, going beyond the simple/traditional mother-son relationship. Along with this friendship, I developed many other deep friendships that took place in the context of the city. The very place of the development of my friendships, I now realize, is extremely important. It's not only the positive feelings in the physical spaces, but it's also the multi-layed, nodal experiences of these social interactions in that place - New York - that helped congeal home for me.

I'm sure there's more, but this is getting too long, even for me. Now, in Winnipeg, I find myself selecting the U.S. option in the Google News section and checking the New York City tab on the New York Times website. After doing it so many times, I paused and reflected on why I was doing this. I think I finally understood why my father would always check the Eenadu website at home. I realized that I am recreating the same action almost everyday. I realized this is the daily practice, ritual consecrating my sense of home.

To that end, I am finally able to cope with and accept that I miss New York. Of course I do - who wouldn't miss home?