Incomplete complications

I’m reading this Independence Day special issue of India Today on my flight to Montreal. And I start pondering, like I have done ever so often in the recent past, about Nationalism, India and my nationalism and my India. Every time I hear, read, talk, see anything about India, I’m filled with this irresistible urge to go running back home, grow roots and never leave. Then I wonder… what is it that keeps me from doing exactly that, right now?

Five years is a long time. I started my adult life here in the US, and in five years you “weave tangled webs”- make friends, create routines, build patterns- that are hard to leave behind. It’s here that I came into my own as a person, as an adult, earning my own keep and doing my own laundry. It’s here that I experienced the incredible convenience and utter loneliness of island living. It’s here that I live with my boyfriend, my books, my weekend India calls and my many pairs of shoes. This cocoon I have, is hard to give up. Also I have this niggling suspicion that there are things to do, places to see, oceans to swim in, people to meet in this part of the world … all of which may never happen if I pack my bags and leave right now, never to return, as the story goes.

So I don’t leave right now, and wait instead for the right time and the right opportunity. Months could become years could become a lifetime and I could still be here- with confused teenaged children and all- still waiting for the right time and the right opportunity. The thought scares me silly. I wonder why? I wonder why human beings feel the need to be where they can say they belong. It’s such a strange need… this need to belong.

But this obsession of mine to return to India is a bit more complicated. There is, of course, the need to belong. There is also the sheer joy of living in a complex cultural set up like India. Only the monotonous sanity and sterility of life in the US can teach one to savour the unpredictability and quirkiness of our homeland. But in addition to all of these, there is also the random feeling of guilt. At leaving, at not being ‘home’…the guilt of a deserter.

I think of these boundaries of nation, which should be no more sacred than those of religion, language, caste and place… but somehow they are or have become! If I should feel guilty about leaving the motherland to live in some strange country, I should also feel guilty about leaving my native Chennai to go settle in Bangalore, Bombay or wherever within India.

I remember reading Tagore’s denunciation of Nationalism when I was much younger, and wondering if he was not just making excuses for his lack of national fervour. I wonder now if I’m making the same excuses too. Or maybe I am just growing up.