Home is where we will return

THE QUESTION of belongingness is a tricky one to answer. No, it is actually a tedious one. To ascertain one’s affection (or lack of it) towards a thing, and then not let it waver in the long run, is not easy.

No one will know this quandary more than a man caught between his love for his wife and his mother, or an expatriate caught between his sentiments for his resident nation and his homeland. As a Non Resident Indian, there are three occasions when this predicament becomes pronounced to me — on the occasion of our Independence and Republic Days and the National Day here, during my vacations in India and whenever there is an important or critical event back home.

Two weeks ago, like every year, I watched the Indian Finance Minister deliver the Union budget speech on TV, and while doing so, I wondered how much of what he announced really affected me or those of my ilk who have grown roots on foreign shores. The thought was a repeat of what I had felt nearly two months ago when we were presented with the greatest democratic spectacle on earth. Of what relevance are the things that happen back home to us? Why was I so curious? The answer wasn’t difficult to find.

To us, especially those docked in the Arabian stretch, every single twitch on the face of India is significant. Every alteration in its course is of immense consequence. We sweat here when the summer sizzles there, shiver when the ice falls and pine when the monsoon descends there. We Gulfees may be distanced, but we are not disconnected. Like water hyacinth, we have floating roots that take us back and forth to our homeland and here. We may be living here, but we belong there and this belongingness is more real than flashes of migrant nostalgia. We are firm in the fact that that is our home and some day we shall return for good.

To us Gulfees, a government change back home is far more significant than it would be to a Non Resident in other places, for we still park our earnings back home. Our remittances still go into the making of our country’s roads, railways and retails chains, just as much as it shores up our future. We still carry our country’s passports and long to cast our votes. Our stinking trains, fractured education system, infrastructural woes and security issues hassle us because our country is still an essential part of our psyche and it is impossible to alienate us from it physically.

We build homes there to roost in our final, frail years. So we ask — will our country provide us with sound health care when we are down and ailing? Will our deposits fetch us enough return to pay our bills? A majority of us recognise that our children will all leave us for the same purpose that we are now here for and we will be left on our own. This makes our connection to our homeland more crucial. Even as we live a chimerical existence in the air-conditioned desert, we recognise that eventually we will be part of the mayhem there that we are insulated from presently. A retreat from here is inevitable, and in this, my houseboy and I are equal. And in this, our concerns find commonness.

We Gulfees are an amorphous human mass that is envied and caricatured at the same time. Like baggage carousels at the airport we go round and round till we are off loaded for the last leg of our lives that we had pledged behind when we took our maiden flight.

Our lives here are spent in the unrelenting worry about those years. What happens in our lives then depends on what happens in our country in the years preceding it. This makes any breaking news from home utterly relevant for us.

Asha Iyer Kumar is a freelance journalist based in Dubai