“The Long Tail of the Moment” is a bi-weekly column that examines the cultural zeitgeist—what drives the sudden, violent popularity and massive scale of viral blips/outliers on the erratic graph of popular culture.
There’s a sliver of overlap in the Venn diagram of Yale students; I live in the no-man’s land between those from far-flung homelands inaccessible except for two good months a year, and those fresh off the boat from developing shores chasing the American Dream. We’re an increasingly endangered species.
“Home isn’t a place, it’s the people,” but home is also a place where there are no green card marriage jokes that get a little less funny each time I crack them. Home can’t be separated from not-home—where I am not always permeates every corner of where I am. New Delhi is what New Haven isn’t, and every flight back has a mirror; I still don’t know whether I want these round trips to be one-way tickets. When I wake up—to familiar dosas sizzling on iron tawas for breakfast and well-rehearsed fights with familiar sunkissed siblings in the familiar bungalow scarred with familiar chipped edges and crayon marks of our childhood, nestled in the familiar streets I grew up running along with familiar friends—nostalgia crests high enough to drown any thought of leaving.
New Delhi is 28 hours and 30 minutes from New Haven. In the most polluted city in the world, I breathe in the freshest, free-est air. Between the excitement of being back home after 6 months and escaping a finals-infected Yale, my constant mental tally that compares college and home falls firmly in India’s favor. Returning to my childhood home means a return to my childhood. I slip back into the still frames lining my family’s mantle, frozen once again in the joys that are always brighter and warmer in the frigid Yale winter. I immediately start working my way through the laundry list of local restaurants that have haunted my dreams for the past six months; old friends accompany me on those trips down well -rodden memory lanes. Anxieties about extending visas and graduate degrees and full-time jobs are boxed and stuffed somewhere in the back of my head—I bask in the sunniness of my mother’s smile and of the many thoughts flitting through my head, not a single one relates to dwindling groceries or approaching timesheet deadlines. I can hardly believe I left for supposedly-greener pastures three years ago. I can hardly stomach leaving forever.
The jet lag lifts, however. The distance and time has caused some warping, and my once-solid wooden foundation is no longer as unshakeable. Neither me nor home have remained frozen in amber; jaywalking on Delhi’s famously crowded streets, my friends are the first to notice my newfound preference for New York crosswalks. I go to the National Gallery of Modern Art, and oh! our India section might ironically be smaller than the Met’s. I get lost no matter where I am, but it does feel a little pathetic to have to Google Maps my way through Connaught Place. As my mom and I finally talk to each other for longer than 20 minutes at a time stolen between a 9 and a half hour difference, I learn that things aren’t “the same, as per usual.” Nothing is actually as it was when I took that last flight back in May, but it’s a lot easier to lie to someone when they’re 7,000 miles away. It’s a lot harder to be the Robin to my single mother’s Batman when Gotham spans multiple oceans.
People often ask me how long I’m staying; rarely do they ask when I’m coming back. We’re all happier to perch on the sides of armchairs and lean against walls as the elephant makes himself comfortable in the middle of the room. The assumption hums beneath every conversation: that I am in transit, temporarily on leave from real life. It is strange to have your presence treated like a layover. Love becomes tinged with a preemptive nostalgia. We make memories with the quiet understanding that they will have to last, stretched thin across months of distance and poor WiFi. Twenty days of sleeping in till 11 a.m. and catching up on a semester’s worth of media isn’t enough to make me face my own thoughts. I, too, treat home as a reprieve. My consciousness might be on the fence, but my subconscious has already decided to boldly go toward a new home—uncertain and unfamiliar though it may be.
The danger of home is that it remembers you as you were. The danger of leaving is that you are never quite sure where you’ll end up. When I say I miss home in New Haven, I mean New Delhi as it exists in my head—sun-drenched and static, my parents forever younger, my friends always throwing stones at my window. When I say I miss home in New Delhi, I mean New Haven as it promises to be—full of possibility, unburdened by the weight of expectation, anonymous and wide. There is privilege in being able to leave, and guilt in wanting to stay gone. I am acutely aware that my oscillation is not universal—that borders are more porous for some than others, and my uncertainty is cushioned by opportunity. And yet, knowing this does not make the choice any easier. If anything, to remain undecided is a failure of courage.
The flight back will compress me again into 28 hours and 30 minutes of suspended identity. Somewhere over the Atlantic, I will be neither here nor there, untethered and briefly weightless. I will rehearse explanations for both sides; I will give myself a finite number for these circular trips. Perhaps this is the condition of my generation, chasing what’s better and ignoring what’s left behind. Perhaps home will no longer be a singular noun, but a verb—something I do, rather than something I have. For now, I live in that splinter that refuses property ownership. It is uncomfortable and precarious and lonely. It is also, for better or worse, mine.
