Lately I've been thinking a lot about what it is that keeps me away from India...why have I spent most of my life as an expat and tourist with no home country to call my own?
I came to the US to study, as so many do. And stayed to continue my training and eventually stayed because the job opportunity here was great...at least for the short term. The experience I can get where I am now, the mentorship, the resume building are all unsurpassable elsewhere. So it was certainly difficult to pass all that up when it was time to become a grown up and move out of student/training mode and into real job mode. I've come to love the city I live in (which I never though I'd say), and I've made a family here amongst friends I love. I have a network of support and love that is fantastic...and freedoms to live my life in ways that would be unparalleled in India.
But it's not home.
I recently went back to India for a wedding (what else!) and saw cousins for the first time in years. So many of them have husbands and wives I've never met...kids I've never seen who are now 7, 8, 9 years old. Engagements, weddings, childbirths, birthdays, and even a few funerals...I've missed so many important days and moments that I can't even begin to count them.
In fact, at no time did I miss home more than I did in the last month. And oddly enough, it wasn't because I wasn't there for a beloved cousin's wedding, or that I missed yet another niece or nephews birth or birthday. It was because several family members got very sick...and I couldn't be there to help.
I'm in the medical field...and the only one in my family at that. So I always expected (as did my family) that I'd be the family medical expert. I frequently get calls about lab results, medications, medication side effects, etc, etc...most questions, in fact, completely out of my realm of expertise. But I can look things up and come up with a cohesive understanding of most of what's happening and I can help my family understand and negotiate their medical issues to the best of my ability...a fact I've always found comforting, and gratifying. After all, my family is a big reason I joined the medical profession so being able to use those skills and education for them is very very important to me.
But as I discovered recently, it's very difficult to do anything when you're on the other side of the world. My aunt got cancer and I could do nothing to help...except try to be the one person with whom she didn't need to explain what a Portacath was, or what the staging of her cancer meant. I would have liked to have been there with her when she got her first chemo treatment...or when the doctor was explaining the biopsy findings. Or at the least to be able to be there if she needed. But instead I just spoke to her on the phone. A cousin got sick and I could do nothing...could barely sort out what was going on from far away.
And worst of all, my uncle ended up in the ICU and I was helpless. Had I lived closer, I would have flown to the city and camped out by the bedside...been the one to talk to the doctors on the phone so that I could both understand and then explain to my aunt and all the rest of my family what exactly was going on with him, what to expect over the next few days, and what the medical terms the doctors were throwing around meant. Instead, I was forced to try to understand third hand what the doctors were saying...or to have 3 minute conversations over a bad phone line with the physician and then try to read between the lines.
It's funny that as much as I regret missing all the joyous moments in my family's history, it's the sad, stressful, and potentially devastating moments that are really difficult to be far away for. It's the feeling that I'm somehow letting my family down by not being able to support and help them as I desperately want to that's the worst feeling of all.
And as a result...after many years, I find myself thinking that it's time to start figuring out how to go home. To quote a song that always always brings tears to the eyes of Indian expats "bade dinon ke baad, hum bewatanon ko yaad, watan ki mitti aayi hai". So...I don't know exactly how or when...but somehow, sometime soon, I know I'm going home.
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