The other day one of my old friends settled in the U.S.A. for more than 40 years decided to visit us from his present residence in another city. Despite his advanced age, he is in good health and visits India fairly frequently, yearly or every other year. During my conversations with him, I casually asked him when his next visit to India will be. His response was somewhat unsettling and surprising: “I don’t think I would want to go back again anymore.” It was a surprising statement coming from a person like him, for he always looked forward to his visits to India. Now that his children were grown up, married and well-settled, I thought he would want to visit his native home even more frequently than in the past.
Suddenly it dawned on me that only recently, less than a couple of months ago, his last surviving brother in India had died. No doubt he had several nephews and nieces in India, but without living parents or any surviving sibling, there was no pressing reason left for him to visit. I started to think perhaps his statement was the result of that situation. It was then that my own life story and those of many other NRIs started to unfold in front of my eyes. The situation was more or less the same among many of us given that we, the immigrants have been through the same waters. In the early 70s, I, too, decided to leave my extended family back home, including my mother, three brothers and their growing families in order to seek higher training and education in the West. Every year for the next several decades, there was a reason–such as mother’s health, the wedding of a nephew or niece, or death of a close relative etc.–for me to return home.
With the passage of time, however, my mother passed away and then two of my brothers also left this world, one after the other. Of course there were several of my caring nephews and nieces back home, and my visits with them, even after my brothers’ death, were still pleasant, enjoyable and I often looked forward to those reunions. Most of their children developed an affinity with me and my wife and they would often look forward to the visit of their parents-like uncle and aunt settled in America. So were we. But now as their families are further expanding and they have their own lives to live along with their own issues and concerns, those visits back home are not as appealing as they were before. And perhaps the same kind of feeling has developed among them too.
Needless to say, in the past, these visits back home had different kinds of attractions based on the phase of one’s life. Initially when one returned home as a young person, the most important objective of the visit, as stated earlier, was to reconnect with one’s parents brothers, sisters and childhood friends. Once the obligations of school or career were complete, one would go back not only to visit one’s parents, but also to find a spouse. It may sound odd to the ears and eyes of a westerner but this indeed happens to be the case. The majority of Eastern boys or girls, arriving here in the West as first generation immigrants, usually went back to look for a match born and raised in the country of their own birth.
There were reasons for this. First of all, having spent most of one’s life in his or her home country, one wished to find a life- partner who shared similar culture. But equally important was the fact that there simply was not a large enough pool of East Indian young people in the Western world back then to find a suitable match. This difficulty in finding a suitable match was further compounded by the divisions among the Indians based on caste, creed, state and tribes that do not seem to go away regardless of how long we might have lived in the West. Rather, the caste system of India with its tentacles keeps on spreading further all over the world wherever we, the people of India, decide to move and settle. It certainly affects and limits the choices of our children, albeit to an extent, in selecting partners.
When children, a natural outcome of the marriage – more so among our culture than among the westerners – started to appear on the scene, interestingly an extreme desire overtook most of the immigrants. They hoped and prayed that their children would stay in touch with their Eastern culture. In order to achieve that objective, almost all the immigrants, regardless of their background, began to exhibit an extraordinary affinity for their native languages, their faiths, and their cultures, much more than they had while in India. The urge to re-establish that faded relationship with their forgotten parents and siblings, as well as near and dear ones, also appeared to rekindle itself once again. Taking children back home for a visit was felt to be perhaps one of the best ways to achieve these objectives.
The fact that their children missed schools for extended periods of time during the school year always weighed heavy on their minds. Consequently, many NRIs tried to organize visits to India during either summer or winter vacations, but those are the months when the weather in India usually does not cooperate. Extreme degrees of heat and rain throughout most of India, along with the attendant infectious and mosquito-borne illnesses always stood ready to add their share of misery-laden illnesses in dimming the excitement of a visit among the minds of the expatriates living abroad. With the passage of time, they had lost immunity for such illnesses. Yet, the urge to visit the motherland often seemed to have an upper hand and mostly claimed victory in motivating them to take the needed precautions and carry on with the mission of being with the near and dear ones for a while.
As life kept on moving, the loss of close relatives coupled with other difficulties started to take its toll on the need for repeated sojourns. Many of us, the NRIs from the Eastern world, began to opt for visits from our parents instead of making regular trips ourselves. It was forgotten, however that the long stays in a predominant western culture had subtly transformed us, the NRIs and our Eastern values. The western concept of material richness and selfish mentality in relationships had slowly made its imprints on our psyche with resultant metamorphosis in the thought processes without our becoming truly conscious of it. The love and respect for our parents had been polluted by a component of “me first” mentality, a certain outcome of Western thinking. Little did we realize that the elderly parents, freshly arriving from home, would have no clue as to what is in store for them given the subtle shift in our attitudes?
The positive byproduct of these arrangements, i.e., to have stay-at-home elderly parents however, overshadowed all that was negative, rather it offered many advantages to the first generation well-settled NRI immigrants. First, this arrangement provided free babysitting for NRI’s toddlers while allowing both husband and wife to work full-time in order to better meet their growing financial needs. Second it also helped grandparents to facilitate the process of establishing a close relationship with their grandchildren by creating a bond, thus keeping the Western-born children connected to the Eastern culture and values. It was a win-win situation for all involved. However, as mentioned above, a negative corollary was the reduction in repeated and frequent visits to motherland as the main stimulus, did not exist anymore.
Their parents, siblings, and others with whom they spent their childhood and for whom these visits were intended, were already saying good-byes forever, one after another. And once they were gone, there wasn’t much motivation left to visit back home and retrace the steps. The curtain had already dropped or was ready to drop and the show of life was exhibiting that well-known sign: “The End,” not unlike what my longtime friend already realized when he told me, “I don’t think I would want to go again for a visit back home anymore.”
*The Author of Western Mirror, Eastern Reflections
