Romantic ideas of home

Despite the fact that life is good – great even – twice this year I have returned from India and found myself dragging my feet.

I was being an ingrate, I told myself. The job was interesting. Friends were fabulous. I had enough of a steady income to afford me holidays (and those trips to India). And my parents were in good health.

I wondered if I was homesick. It was an unfamiliar feeling. My earliest memories are of leaving for boarding school, cheerful and strutting towards an aeroplane – violin case in one hand and the dreaded “unaccompanied minor” sign hanging from my neck – while waving goodbye to the parents. They were not, if memory serves, upset to see me leave. I was seven. The only child of two very busy doctors.

Could it be that, weary of world travel and having to fend for myself all of these years, I was missing my family?

I called my mother. I am told I am built like her, with little time for careless emotion. I missed my parents no more than when I left home as a child. Did I miss the house? Not particularly. Friends at home? There were none. Those bonds were created in school and foreign countries and, thanks to the internet, we were still in touch. My mother told me to stop moping and count my blessings.

Last week, I met a friend whom I’ve known since we were in grade three. He lives in Hong Kong now, but we found ourselves in Bangalore – he on business, I to attend a wedding – at the same time. We caught up even though there was little of that to do, thanks to modern technology. I told him of my growing dilemma.

“So you want to move back to India?” he asked. That was it! I was no longer satisfied with being a visitor in my own country, or with the nostalgia of spending childhood in a place that has since grown into an economic power. I wanted my fair share, but was it fair to ask it from a place where I had not lived for more than 13 years?

“You have romantic delusions,” my friend said and explained a sentiment that most expatriates feel when they have been away from home for too long. The idea of their imagined homeland grows larger in their head with every passing day. And the resolve to return one day generates its own mix of guilt and apprehension.

I finally admitted to myself that I had been away for too long, and was likely to be for longer. And that what I was feeling was homesickness for an imagined homeland.