no. 1: it all started in an 11 pm cab in mumbai

the conversation that now keeps me up at night

Back in September, my mom and I spent a week in India together, during Ganesh Chaturthi. For anyone new to the festival, Mumbai is *the place* to be for Ganpati – families host small clay idols in their homes, and after 5-10 days, take their Ganpati in a public procession to then immerse it into a body of water, whether a river or sea – or one of the many little fake ponds that local governments made across Mumbai this year. 

On a whim, this year, my mom and I spent a day in Matunga to see the GSB Ganpati in Kings Circle, Matunga. We really weren’t planning to brave the usual festival crowds on this trip, but found a way to make it happen and seized the moment – to then traipse around and find whichever other Ganpatis we could, amidst little snack and shop stops along the way. It now unequivocally is at the top of my favorite experiences I’ve had in Mumbai. 

My mom and I rarely get to spend time together in India. I value spending time with friends or at a job that I love here in DC, while simultaneously juggling far too many little bucket lists in my early 20s, so my trips are a little more infrequent than hers. My mom and I rarely coordinate our trips at this point either – adulthood begets seizing the opportunity to go whenever it arises, no matter how much my childlike desire for comfort yearns to not be going alone. 

But there genuinely are few things I love like being in India with my parents as a young adult. Yes, it’s partially because my parents are cooler than average, so I really enjoy traveling with them, and we all have independent travel preferences that align well. But more than that, there’s a feeling of trying to collectively find a unique experience in going back that the three of us seem to share. My parents aren’t still the people they were when they left India after medical school – not just that they’re 20-something years older, but that the country they left behind has changed, and the country they came to has changed them. In books and movies, people so often articulate this as places looking different, old shops and homes no longer being here. It’s seen as a black-and-white transformation – “This place has materially changed, or this place is exactly how I left it.”

The reality I’ve seen in my parents is much more gray. It’s pockets of familiarity embedded in streets of novelty and modernization. Parts of Matunga, where much of our extended family still lives, and where my mom spent a lot of time growing up, still do look the same. We go to the same place where my mom used to drink sugarcane juice decades ago, pick up Hindi books for me from a bookstore she bought her school books from, and a little South Indian spot for filter coffee that is a cult favorite in our family. And yet, property values are soaring with massive building renovations, Ubers are available at a moment’s notice, and we visit new vegetarian restaurants with 10+ page menus of every possible cuisine. This place is one of familiarity – in some ways, it does look the same and is exactly how she left it – and yet to a degree, it has materially changed, and a relationship of belonging has shifted. My mom has often come home from India and said something along the lines of “I don’t quite belong there the same way I used to.”

There’s an infinite number of ways to define a purpose for a trip to India. For me, at its core, it’s getting to see my grandparents, two people whose presence I crave regularly, who are my rocks in moments of darkness and light. A little more peripheral is tangible cultural experiences – eating, shopping, sightseeing, traveling. A little deeper is a pause – being less regularly connected to social media, my email, and my friends, while reflecting on the way my history here has shaped me now. At another level, it’s craving a level of anonymity that I, as a South Asian woman in the US, am quite literally never granted in an urban environment, no matter the personal, professional, or academic space I’m occupying. 

Somewhere at its deepest, it’s discovery and rediscovery – and that’s where it coalesces for my parents and me. 

The relationships that my parents and I hold to India are all different. For them, it’s childhood, upbringing, family, and history. It’s a place they left to start a different life. 

For me, it’s a relationship governed by what now feels like a previous life. In the period between my parents getting their green cards in 2008 and me starting high school in 2013, I spent 4 5-week trips in India, in a period where we were much less connected than we are now. It was 5 weeks of checking my email once, hoping for news about my school schedule or updates from a birthday party I’d missed, not texting or talking to my friends for 5 weeks, missing countless new tv show episodes, and preparing to come home and not recognize any of the new songs on the radio. The trips I took during that time period were at times characterized more by fear than joy. On the first of those trips, just days after I turned 9, we landed just days after one of the worst civilian-targeted terrorist attacks in India in the 21st century. Seeing army patrolmen in train stations, bus stops, and at the airport, seeing security everywhere, my mindset took a turn. A few years later, the fear shifted, into worry that I might get lost or kidnapped. I wouldn’t even walk out of an auto into a restaurant without holding one of my parents’ hands. I was disconnected from my life in Cleveland, spending weeks in a place I didn’t like being, even if I loved being with family because I grappling with a deep preteen’s fear that I was going to lose the life I loved in the US to one of those trips.

Eventually, I got past that – when I started having more agency to decide my travels, I wasn’t going for over a month at a time, and when I stopped feeling isolated from my friends and life at home, I rebuilt my relationship with being in India.

But what embracing every one of these trips now, and each chance to be in India with my parents has told me, is none of us belong there perfectly. I was raised as a first-gen Indian-American, my parents have changed, and India is no longer what it was in 1997 when they left. My parents are no longer trying to approximate an exact relationship to space and upbringing, given that experience can no longer exist amidst decades of change. Every one of these trips is a different kind of understanding of new places, new memories, and a new conception of what life in India looks like for us, as a diaspora family, when we’re there, whether it’s for my 2-week stints when I can clear my calendar, or my parents more extended trips together in enjoying their empty-nester phase of life. 

That discovery and rediscovery is the pursuit at the core of my writing this Substack. 

On my last day in India, as my mom and I took a cab back to the airport, we were discussing how our sense of self in India often lacks an independent identity. We don’t spend our time in India doing what 20-something and 50-something women would do in India ordinarily because those aren’t lives or beings we have access to. We don’t have unique responsibilities in India – but we also don’t hang out in places our age groups do, don’t spend time with people our own age, and don’t know what those people do day-to-day in Mumbai at all.

I’ve thought long about that conversation since coming back to DC too. I don’t know what it looks like to be a 20-something diaspora girl in a major metropolitan American city. After all, at times, I feel like I’m just approximating pieces of other people’s blueprints that they’ve left in the way they share their lives with the public – the jewelry I wear, the food I eat, the decor in my apartment. The closest experience that I can approximate with certainty is growing up in an Indian household in Cleveland. But that’s my parents' life. And even that, in Cleveland and in college, was one that made me feel Indian by virtue of being around other Indian kids and having brown skin, but not as a reflection of my own identity formation and development. Performing identity in those ways isn’t feasible for me to approximate, single, living alone, working in the policy world, and spending time often in predominantly white spaces. 

I spend most of my free time reading and talking about theory, spend the rest of my less free time thinking about how that theory interacts with and influences my choices, the work I do, the underlying meaning and implications of my decisions, the way I perceive my role and sense of self in the world, and my relationships to others, both the most distant of strangers and the closest of friends. But when there’s no blueprint in answering those questions, in navigating that myriad of aspects of our identities, how theory and history come together in a life with slightly rough edges and mixed experiences, how are we supposed to get there?

I think it starts in conversations like this. I hope in reading, you’ll confirm that too.