A Change of Heart

As grandma’s return to India fast approaches, mom finds herself in a familiar funk again. The petulant child in her does not want her mother to leave.

Despite grandma’s constant observations on how careless mom is about her things, and how she still hasn’t returned her aunt’s phone call since May, mom wants to cling to her sari, with tears streaming down her face, and beg her to stay. She wants to lie on her lap and feel her chapped, work-worn palms stroke her hair. She wants to go on long walks around the neighborhood with her. She wants to tell her how sorry she is when she snaps at her. She wants to make her tea flavored with cardamom and ginger. She wants to pluck the moon from the sky and bring it to her….

Not for the first time since she moved here, mom wishes she were Mexican. Just so she could visit her entire family by hopping in her car, like her former neighbor regularly did, and drive across the border with her kids and dog during school breaks.

“Can’t you get an expat assignment in India?” she asks dad, as though his company hands them out like mithai during Diwali. “That way, we can get a taste of living there.”

“Well, can’t you?” counters dad. “And what do you mean by getting a taste? You know exactly what it’s like in India.”

True. Mom spent her formative years dodging killer traffic, creepy crawlies and groping men. When the time came to look for a husband, she unashamedly asked for a groom abroad – a non-demanding type who could conform to her late-to-bed-late-to-rise lifestyle and wouldn’t annoy her by playing Suprabhatam by M.S. Subbulakshmi at 7:30 a.m. on a Sunday, as her parents sometimes did.

“Do you like to do breathing exercises in the mornings?” she had asked dad at their first meeting. "Do you find it mentally relaxing if you jump-start your day by waking up at the crack of dawn and bathing in ice cold water?"

“You're kidding, right?" dad had asked quizzically.

It was a match made in heaven.

For the most part, mom adores her lazyass laidback lifestyle here, where she doesn’t have to boil milk on a daily basis or haggle with vegetable vendors over the price of tomatoes. She likes living in a place where she can publicly argue with dad in a language that people around her wouldn't understand.

At other times, however, such as when she hears her daughter gurgling with her grandmother or watches her son locate his grandfather’s misplaced reading glasses so they can solve a Sudoku puzzle together, she longs to return to that familial fold she left behind more than a decade ago.

She yearns for that place she once called “home.”