A Desi in Pardes

A little over 2 years back I moved lock, stock and barrel to a new country, a world and a half away from my motherland. At the time, the fairy dust sprinkled idea of new beginnings made the transition feel like a barrel of fun. I felt like Alice in Wonderland as I wittingly jumped into the rabbit hole with all intentions of embracing every new experience that awaited me behind each locked door. And embrace I did! From the newness of married life to the unfamiliarity of the environs to the deliciousness of possessing a profusion of time – I accepted it all with arms wide open. As I took baby steps at finding my bearings, each day slipped by as smooth as butter silk, leaving me slightly wiser about the laws of the land. Yet, at the end of each day, just before going to bed, I felt a tug at my heartstrings. A tug so faint that at first it was quite easy for me to ignore it or conveniently place the blame for it on what I had eaten for dinner that day. I did not want to give it any credence especially for the fear of being labelled ‘soft and sentimental’ as opposed to ‘rough and tough’. 

******************

While ‘Time’ lived up to its reputation of being a fast runner and days amalgamated into each other in a blur of sorts, the aforementioned tug took on a life of its own and grew into a more pronounced ache. Stubborn as I am, I still refused to acknowledge this strange feeling and callously dismissed it as one of the many quirks that an average human body exhibits. Then one day, after the usual Sunday morning Skype call with my folks, Arjun expressed a desire for a plateful of über greasy, yet super tasty Chole Bhature (a type of deep fried Indian street-food). Thankfully, California provides an array of options to pick from, to satisfy a mid-morning hankering of this kind. Within minutes we settled upon a typical roadside, ‘Sardaarji’-owned dhaaba called ‘Lovely Sweets’ that had been highly recommended by Arjun’s advisor. Getting dressed, I thought to myself, ‘Back in India I would rarely eat Chole Bhature. In fact I remember screwing up my nose at the thought of devouring such oily fare. Then why am I so excited about it today?’ There was only one way to find out.

******************

Inside the run-down little dhaaba, I breathed deeply the smell of desi food and took in the sights of a miniature India right in the heart of a foreign land. It was like an exotic brown island in the middle of a sea of white frothy waves. The Hindi that I could hear other patrons speak was music to my ears, even in its slightly convoluted, accented form. Like magic, the ache within subsided almost as if I had taken a pain killer. That’s when an epiphany struck me hard. What had surfaced in the form of physical discomfiture was actually a craving for a sense of belonging. I longed for those aspects of life back home that had seemed usual and mundane. To call a shopkeeper ‘Bhaiyya’ and haggle away to glory or yell my lungs out at a bothersome ‘Autowallah’ or hear a cacophony of car horns on the road or devour a variety of flavourful mangoes by the dozen or speak in a strange medley of Hindi and English and still be understood by all and sundry - these were the sort of things I had grown up doing and was thus feeling odd without. As absurd as it may sound, the chaotic vibrancy of my country had trumped over the mechanical predictability of the ‘land of plenty’, at least for a short while.

****************** 

I do not know how many days, months or even years it would take for this yearning to fade away. In the jigsaw puzzle that this new country is, will I ever fit in perfectly like a piece that is an integral part? It might be difficult owing to a conglomeration of several small reasons like the fact that I need a rather difficult-to-procure work-permit to be employable here or that sometimes I do not understand the tone of speech and mannerisms of people or that I speak with a different cadence which they find difficult to comprehend at times or that my British influenced English pronunciations amuse them.....I can go on with a laundry list of dissimilarities. Despite all this, I must say that I have been fortunate enough to make friends here who look beyond these petty differences and even though we have disparate backgrounds, they remind me very much of my friends back home especially when we get together and giggle away about silly little things. On the other hand, no matter how many years I spend here, India will always be the country where my roots are safely entrenched. It will forever be the country where my heart resides. That my tongue still salivates for a ghee soaked motichoor laddoo or that I always know which new Hindi movies I want to watch and when are they releasing goes to prove that you can take Preeti out of her des but you cannot take the desi-ness out of Preeti!

Des - country 

Pardes - foreign land 

Chole Bhature - a type of deep fried Indian bread with chick-peas in gravy

dhaaba - roadside restaurants found on highways in India and Pakistan

ghee - clarified butter

motichoor laddoo - Indian dessert 
desi -  is a Hindi term for the people, cultures, and products of the Indian subcontinent