I use the phrase “back home” to refer to two places.
If I’m at Yale and I tell someone I’m going “back home” for October recess, I mean New York. I mean the Metro-North to the subway, my bed, my parents in the next room and knowing exactly where everything is.
But I also say “back home” when I mean Bangladesh.
Mangoes taste way better back home. Someone is getting married back home. My parents are arguing about land back home. There are relatives that I haven’t seen in years back home. In those sentences, there is no question that I mean Bangladesh. More specifically, Sylhet.
This semester, I’m taking a class called “Drama in Diaspora: South Asian American Theater and Performance,” where we keep returning to the same question that sounds simple until you actually try to answer it: What is home to a person in diaspora? Is it where your family comes from? Is it the place they moved to? Is it wherever you grew up? My question is, what happens when all of those answers are true?
I was born in Bangladesh, but I moved to New York when I was five. New York is where I went to school, where I made friends, where I learned to cross streets and take trains and exist without holding my parents’ hands. If you ask me where I grew up, there is zero hesitation. The Bronx.
Bangladesh exists in my memory differently. Some of it is mine. Some of it has been passed down to me. I know places through my parents’ stories as much as through my own experience. I know which relatives lived where, who moved, which house used to belong to whom. I know foods by the way my parents say they are supposed to taste. There is always a version of something in America that is almost right and a version back home that proves the difference.
Chai tastes better back home. The fish is better back home. People know their neighbors back home. Nobody would do that back home. Sometimes “back home” is a location, sometimes just an argument. Sometimes I say it without even realizing which home I have chosen. And the phrase gets stranger when I actually go to Bangladesh. There, I am from America. Relatives ask me about New York. People notice my Bangla. I’ll pause in the middle of a sentence because I can only remember a word in English, or someone will point out the way I pronounced something. Sometimes my cousins switch to English for me before I even ask. Relatives want to know what Yale is like, what I do with my friends in America, whether I could ever see myself living in Bangladesh. Things I never think twice about in New York suddenly become things I have to explain. In America, I am used to explaining the Bangladeshi parts of my life. In Bangladesh, I find myself doing the opposite. Eventually, someone will ask when I am going back. Back to America. Back home. There is something strange about traveling thousands of miles back home only to eventually leave and go back home again.
Maybe this is why the question we keep discussing in class has stayed with me. Is home the place you came from or the place you grew up? South Asia or America? Bangladesh or New York? Growing up, I did sometimes want a cleaner response to the question “Where are you from?” One that didn’t require a follow-up sentence. Bangladesh is the obvious answer until someone asks when I moved here. New York is the obvious answer until someone asks where my family is from. The Bronx is the obvious answer until someone hears my parents speaking Bangla.
At some point, I realized that “Where are you from?” is rarely asking for a location. It is asking for an explanation. So I learned to give one: I’m Bangladeshi. I grew up in New York. My family is from Sylhet. I moved here when I was five. There. Now you know. Before you ask. But “back home” resists that kind of explanation. I don’t stop mid-sentence and decide which country has earned the word. I just use it. New York is not less my home because Bangladesh is one too, and Bangladesh does not lose its claim because I have spent most of my life somewhere else.
My parents make this distinction even clearer in a way I wish they wouldn’t. Every so often, in the casual and slightly horrifying way parents sometimes discuss their own deaths, they remind me what I am supposed to do when they die: “You have to bury us back home.” They have made me promise. I hate these conversations. I don’t want instructions for a future in which they aren’t here. I don’t want to imagine their deaths as something practical, involving plane tickets and arrangements and phone calls. Usually, I want them to stop talking the second they start. But the wording stays with me. Back home. They have lived in New York for most of my life. They raised their children here. They worked here, went to doctors here, bought groceries here, built routines here. Their lives are here in all the ordinary ways that make a place yours. And still, when they imagine where their bodies should ultimately rest, there is no ambiguity about which home they mean: Bangladesh.
There is something about that request that makes all of my definitions of home feel inadequate. My parents can build a life in one country and still want to return to another at the very end of it. Home, then, cannot simply mean where you live the longest. It cannot only mean where your children grow up, where your mail arrives or where you spend most of your days.
I used to hear my parents talk about Bangladesh and wonder how somewhere you left so long ago could still occupy so much space in your present. I’m beginning to understand that leaving somewhere does not necessarily turn it into the past.
College has made me understand this on a smaller scale. I complain about New York constantly when I’m there. The train is delayed. Everything is expensive. Someone is blocking the sidewalk. Then I get to New Haven and become the kind of person who starts sentences with “In New York…” before making a completely unnecessary comparison. I miss things I never thought to appreciate because I assumed they would always be around me. I miss hearing Bangla without deliberately seeking it out. I miss my parents calling for me from another room. I miss knowing exactly where everything is. I even miss the parts of home that annoyed me when I lived there full-time: the crowded trains, the noise outside my window, the same commute I used to complain about. There is something comforting about inconveniences you already know how to navigate. Even the monotonous parts of home become familiar enough to miss.
I did not acquire Bangladesh instead of New York. I inherited Bangladesh alongside it. Maybe home accumulates.
There are parts of Bangladesh that belong to me because I remember them, parts because my parents remember them and parts because they have been repeated so often that I can no longer tell the difference. There are parts of New York that feel so completely mine that I never think to explain them. And now there are even pieces of New Haven that I suspect I will miss when I leave. Maybe that is what I have been trying to understand in class. Asking whether home is where you came from or the place you move to assumes that home has to be singular, that eventually one place wins and the other becomes the place you used to live, or the place your parents came from.
My parents can call New York home and still ask me to take them back to Bangladesh someday. I can leave Bangladesh at five and still refer to it as “back home.” I can leave New York for college and suddenly understand how a place becomes more visible from a distance.
So, before they ask: when I say “back home,” I might mean New York. I might mean Bangladesh. Maybe even New Haven. Usually, I don’t have to think about which one.
I know the way home to all.