"Who were they, and to what and whom did they belong? Or was the idea of belonging a trap, a cage from which they had been lucky enough to escape?…Who do you love? What can you leave behind, and what do you need to hold on to? Where does your heart feel full?"

The passage above is from Salman Rushdie's autobiography, in Joseph Anton - A Memoir and captures an internal interrogation that many immigrants return to throughout their lives. Immigration is more than just moving countries. It brings changes in various dimensions - a new country brings with it a new career, a new language, a home, a new life. It creates a version of you that never existed before. Over time, the question becomes more insistent:

"After building a life somewhere else, who are you and where do you belong?"

I moved to the United States in 2013 for my career, earned my master’s degree, started a family, and raised my children here. There is another complication. I have built this life while on an H-1B visa. My career, friendships, house, routines, and children’s lives are rooted here, but some part of me remains conscious that our ability to remain is connected to paperwork, employment, and decisions made by institutions. It is strange to build something permanent while knowing that your legal claim to it may still be treated as temporary.

My kids have never known India as home. The United States is home to them. For me, India is not merely a place I left behind, but for my children, it was never a place they left at all.

Leaving your country is not a single event. You leave it gradually. First, you leave your parents, family, and friends. Then the once-familiar streets and lanes begin to fade from memory. The rhythms that once guided your life are replaced by those of a new land. Your language changes as well. Gradually, you begin using another language without self-consciousness. Festivals and customs adjust to a new calendar. The birthdays move to weekends. The instinctive understanding you once had of the world around you gives way to the conscious effort of learning how to live in another one. A version of you that could exist only in that earlier environment is left behind.

By the time you realize you have changed, you have changed a lot.

But at what point does the country you moved to stop being "abroad" and become home? Is it when you have attained professional growth, or raised a family or bought a new home?

I have built a good life in the United States. I have grown professionally, made friends, and become part of a community. I am grateful to God and to this country for giving me opportunities I had never imagined. Moving here involved loss, but it also created possibilities that may not otherwise have existed.

In America, some part of me will always remain Indian. In India, after so many years away, I no longer feel completely at home either. I understand both societies, but do not participate in either without qualification.

There is a sense of tension within me regarding my identity. In the United States, I remain conscious of being Indian. In India, for lack of a better word, I feel Americanized. I can criticize India at length among family and friends, yet instinctively defend it when someone who does not know it well makes the same criticism. I miss India, but only live there in brief visits. And I feel grateful for America even though I have never completely absorbed an American identity.

Sometimes I ask myself what home is and where it can be found. It no longer seems to exist entirely in one place. An immigrant is not necessarily caught between two complete homes. Sometimes, I feel that we belong to two places incompletely.

What should I hold on to? Another question that troubles me is the cultural identity of my children. M They can speak some Hindi, but they cannot read it or express themselves comfortably in it. This means they cannot fully appreciate Hindi literature. More personally, they cannot read, feel, and understand the poems I write in Hindi. Sometimes I feel that I have not done enough to preserve the language at home.

My children are growing up without their grandparents nearby, so family stories do not pass to them through everyday conversation. As I write this, I realize that I rarely talk to them about my life in India before I moved to the United States. I come from Agra, the city of the Taj Mahal, and I took them there in 2023. In 2024, I made sure we visited Humayun’s Tomb in Delhi. But visiting monuments is not the same as living within the historical, cultural, and religious life of a place.

They have not visited the Banke Bihari Temple in Vrindavan or experienced what I felt when I had my first jhalak of the deity. They have not visited the Mankameshwar Temple in Agra. They have visited India, but they have not experienced it as I did. They know it through trips, places, and relatives rather than as the environment that formed them.

I understand that culture should be an inheritance offered to children, not a debt imposed on them. But I also believe that children should understand where their family came from.

Salman Rushdie makes an important observation in the above quote when he asks, "…was the idea of belonging a trap, a cage from which they had been lucky enough to escape?" Can belonging to a history, culture, or religion become such a trap? Are my kids fortunate enough to escape these? Even to reject customs that have been preserved without examination, one must first know that they exist. But can something be freely accepted or rejected if it was never encountered in the first place? My children may be free from some of the expectations that shaped me, but they may also be separated from the history, language, and traditions that would allow them to decide what is worth carrying forward. Freedom from an inheritance is meaningful only when one knows what that inheritance contains.

My children did not immigrate to the US. Their relationship with India comes through me and my wife. America is the world they know directly. What feels foundational to me may feel optional or distant to them. How much of India should I pass on to them? I feel sad when I consider that they may neverhave the same attachment as I have with India. When I think about moving back, I wonder whether living in India would restore something for them or disrupt the only home they know.

I worry that I assumed my culture would pass naturally to my children, without realizing how deliberately it must be preserved outside the place where it originated. Sometimes I wonder whether I have done enough to preserve it for them. At other times, I wonder whether my desire to preserve it is actually an attempt to preserve myself through them.

I do not have all the answers. Perhaps I never will. Perhaps I will never be able to define home as a single place. I am trying to find home in relationships, memories, responsibilities, and languages. When I sit with my family and watch a Hindi movie, I feel at home. When we have breakfast at Jam + Toast, I feel at home. When friends gather to celebrate a festival, I feel at home. When I visit my parents in India, I feel at home. When my children play in the streets there or spend time with their cousins, I feel at home.

My heart feels full not in one country or the other. It feels full in those brief moments when the life I left and the life I built no longer appear to be competing with each other. Perhaps the immigrant's dilemma is not that we no longer belong anywhere. It is that we continue to belong to people, places, and versions of ourselves that can no longer be gathered in one location.