Dispatch by an American from India

Greetings from India, where I've been for a week, for research, pleasure and family business. This is a rare solo trip to India, though I have met up with my parents. Perhaps it's being on my own, or something about the state of America today, but I feel more American than on any previous trip. After nearly 40 years of living in the United States, that shouldn't come as a surprise. But it does, primarily because when I am in the US, I am so aware of my otherness. And since the 2024 election, I'm also more aware of how tenuous my place is, in a country that is "home".

In India, I get a lot of "but you don't look Indian" and "oh, you speak Hindi?". In America, well, you know the questions. Where are you from? How come your English is so good?

The author Priyanka Mattoo says: "When you don't live in the place you're from, you always feel like an outsider." I heard her speak at the Jaipur Literary Festival last week, on a panel titled "Memoirs of Family, Loss and Exile." In another conversation at the festival, on hyphenated identities, the Indian-born Ira Mathur, who now lives in Trinidad, said she felt a "sense of permanent nostalgia" about India and Sheena Patel talked about mourning "the things you don't know" about a place to which you are connected.

These feelings of being multiply rooted and rootless are familiar to so many of us. And yet we see ourselves as exceptions rather than rules, no? Maybe that's what feels so American – the push to be one thing, to fit in a box. And most of us, really any of us who are fully human, don't fit into any one box. I wish I could say something neat and inspiring to close this post out, but all I can think of is that we are all more alike than we would like to believe.

Sayu