Very few of us who call South Florida our primary residence are native to it and this experience resonates with us.

I was still thinking of the class discussion when later that day, I asked my teen what she felt about going to India, about her routine being messed up, about outings with friends she'd miss, about visiting a country with many beggars and refuse heaps, and about having to go to a place where she doesn't speak the language as fluently. Her suddenly brightening eyes and widening smile answered me more eloquently than her words could: she couldn't wait!

What, then, is it about going home that makes this Odyssey such a necessity? How can a visit of 20 days during which we are going to travel harrowingly, get absolutely no rest, socialize around the clock, fight germs we no longer have immunity against, travel to a land we know offers no comfort of readily-available rest rooms and whose currency we no longer feel familiar with, revive our spirits and lost hearts? There are many answers to this riddle, but the fact of the matter is, we all have this irrefutable need to visit our home land every so often.

And we recognize this need in ourselves and those we see around us.

A comment about this need to visit “Des” is an inevitable part of any exchange with one's acquaintances of South Asian origin, and it immediately joins us an intimate experience. When someone tells me she hasn't visited Des for 4 years, I instantly sympathize and wish her all the best for an imminent voyage from the bottom of my heart. Every time I hear someone has just returned from a trip “home,” my envy is equally instant and heart-felt. This is assuaged only with extensive updates about the latest INOX theatres, coffee shops, and chudi shops that my kid and I can look forward to on my next visit.

I believe this need to go back home with our children has its roots in the choice we all made when we decided to immigrate; in archetypal terms, we decided against making our Janma Bhoomi our Karma Bhoomi. We also signed up for a spectrum of worries that come with forging a new self in a different world, and these worries have to do with the next generation, and the fear and absolute certainty that the land we call home has changed and
continues to do so, without us.

I constantly worry about the many points of differences between me and the next generation, which are compounded because I am an immigrant. I worry my daughter will grow up without the intensely spiritual experience of lighting a clay diya, filled with ghee and a hand-made cotton wick. I am afraid she will never feel like a real woman because she won't know how to wrap or feel comfortable in a sari. I am concerned that her critical thinking and analytical skills won't sharpen because she didn't have the Akbar-Birbal stories or the tales of Vikram-Vetal. She is growing up without Sattodiu, Kho, Kabbadi, even cricket! How do I infuse in her a modicum of who I am? I am afraid I shall be completely erased when she is an adult.

There is another concern central to this same gap between generations: the gap between what we remember of home, and the reality of it.

When we go back, we find the world changed almost beyond recognition. The hawkers we remember who frequented our streets are no longer the same: they've retired or moved; the sugarcane juice vendor near the campus has been replaced by an air-conditioned novelty shop; the paan-wallah at the street corner has moved in with his daughter and now his little hole-in-the wall has expanded to a restaurant attended by his son-in-law; the maidan where kids used to play cricket and kho is no longer there: instead, there is a mall 4 stories high; the familiar banyan tree that was known to be haunted has been replaced with a garden for the adjoining apartment complex rising to the skies. These are familiar sights, and while they are inevitable as the seasons and changing worlds, they rob us of our links to places we grew up in. We feel once more uprooted, more so when we left, like people trapped in a time-warp, who remember times and places that are far gone into the misty realms of memory.

However, a visit home with our kids somehow heals these gaps, both internal and the one with the next generations. This healing starts before the journey begins, even. In my house, it starts even before the packing begins, in the sparkle in my kid's eyes and spring in her step. Somehow, once the tickets to India are bought, it seems a new person emerges slowly from deep within my teen's American-Eagle Hoodie clad shell. She starts answering me in our mother tongue with more frequency; she is careful to finish all homework and keep herself out of trouble for fear that she might be punished and be excluded from shopping trips to get small gifts for people back home; she spends time poring over memories of our previous visits; and most of all, she talks incessantly of the visit, I am sure, much to her friends' frustration and boredom. She does not resent even the harrowing journey to reach home. By the time she emerges from the final plane at the local airport, her Indian self blossoms completely and it really doesn't matter that she still has her American Eagle hoodie on: she is Home and she belongs.

When I see these signs, I smile to myself and remember another time when I used to worry that she would not fit in with the people, the air-water-atmosphere. During my first visit back with her, I had promised myself that I would board the first flight if my baby caught a bad bug or sprouted mysterious allergies. Now, I believe, had I acted on and given in to my fears then, my daughter would never have known the richness of belonging to two worlds at one time. I would have cheated her out of the complexity that defines who I have become because I belong to two different worlds. By taking her back on subsequent visits, in fact, instead of exposing her to new disease vectors, I might have actually done some good: I might have helped crystallize a truly global citizen, who is accepting of differences between peoples and tolerant of other ethnicities.

In fact our routines can be so devouring that we have to make an extra effort to celebrate our festivals, go for an Indian movie, or treat ourselves to cuisine from home. Our kids, too, tend to get swallowed up by their own lives and obligations and we fear we might lose them in essential, really frightening ways. This sense of isolation can be further compounded when we go back to our Des and find things changed there as well. Such an experience can cause us to feel like we belong nowhere, like the proverbial Dhobi's dog.

However, this uprooting, this sense of discomfiture that awaits all immigrants, is the very reason it is important to go back home with our children. Seeing our children find their own way in this land that is forever and no longer ours, heals our displacement and eases our spirit. When we see our kids owning the new landscape, riding their bikes through the new streets, confident in their kite-flying skills, greeting the new neighbors with familiarity, haranguing with the coconut-water man, arguing with the tailor, meeting friends at the Barista or Kwality, and begging us to take them to Crosswords assures us that in spite of the fact that our kids are born in one place and we in another, we've given them roots, and one's roots go beyond place of birth and find their way to what is generally understood as the concept of home, Des, where one recognizes and is recognized.

So ultimately, a visit home with the next generation strengthens our roots, rather than displace us. Our inner compasses click and whirr into place. We are comforted that in spite of our fears to the contrary, things have NOT fallen apart; the center still holds.