Home away from home

It struck me as I was sipping tea yesterday evening. And to think of it, I had remained oblivious of it until recently, maybe taking it for granted. For a shade less than a year, I have been working in the US and living in little India! That’s what my apartment building is – little India. Yeah, it is true that almost half of the apartments in my building have desi tenants but there is more to it. Living in Oak tree means that, apart from being able to walk into friends’ homes (something that a lot of my Oxbridge migrating brethren miss after College) and meeting over impromptu potlucks, I end up eating and cooking with four roomies, cleaning up the living room on weekends, playing pranks and getting to know a whole lot of people who are walking similar paths. I can also walk to work, another aspect of small-town-India that I have adored (quite interestingly, I could not do that for the majority of my schooling in India, having grown up in a burgeoning metropolis teeming with honking buses and busy roads). By no means could my accommodation be termed luxurious. In fact, modest is the word according to me, and I will not be surprised if a lot of people here find it too small for their ‘stuff’. With little ‘stuff’ to stash away, this apartment has worked quite well. I guess this happy marriage between work and home has been a success so far, and is the sole reason for me not being terribly homesick.

I suspect this thought dawned upon me after I had to spend a week away from home for a conference. For more than two decades, I had known my home as where my family is. Not even in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that changing. But the feeling of homecoming I got as we drove home from the Dane County Airport was proof enough that I had already accepted this to be home.