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Displacement

I wonder what it must be like for my parents to consider setting up roots in a completely alien culture with no social network.

By Colin Fernandes, MD September 9, 2008 at 11:04 AM

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At 10 pm local time, June 28, 2008 my parents boarded a Jet Airways aircraft at Bahrain International Airport for what would be their final journey back to India. After 37 years of expatriate living, they were finally returning home.

In the preceding weeks, I had sunken deeper and deeper into a nostalgic melancholia as I contemplated this momentous change. I felt guilty and helpless as I could offer little assistance from afar. And I was amazed that, through all my personal turmoil concerning their Big Move, my parents seemed to be exceptionally well adjusted.

But when I talked with my Mum a few hours before their flight, she related how she had awoken suddenly at night feeling a deep queasiness, and had vomited. It had finally hit her - she was leaving the place she had called home for most of her adult life.
My parents had made a good life for themselves in the Middle East. Lured by an easy tax-free life, they had arrived there at the height of the oil boom. My Mum embarked on a teaching career that would earn her the respect and adulation of thousands of students. My Dad would arise to the post of Chief of Communicable Diseases in the Public Health Division of the Ministry of Health.

Over the years, they had developed a network of friends, as well as connections in high places. My Mum related how, on the eve of their departure, the sister of the late Emir had called them personally to wish them well. Thanks to my Dad's prior job as Port Health Officer, my parents would pay economy and often get upgraded to business. "You don't realize what you have till you are about to lose it," my Mum said in a moment of post-emetic clarity.

But their decision to leave India in the early 1970s had unforeseen consequences for all of us. As a result of that decision, I would be separated from them and head back to India at age 12 to pursue a better education. It was because of that decision that my sister would never ever live in India (she left the Middle East at age 16 for the UK, US and Canada). It was because my Dad lived and worked away from India that he would persuade me to do the same. I left India at age 26 after completing medical school, to complete my Residency and Fellowship in the United States.

And now, at almost 60 and almost 70 respectively, my Mum and Dad would return to a City that was not Bombay, but Mumbai, hoping to reconnect with old friends and family. Soon, they would have to travel again to visit their two children in San Francisco and Vancouver.

I wonder about the sense of displacement they must feel in the context of my own sense of rootless-ness. I hated Bombay initially, but over the years it would endear itself to me. However, as an Indian Christian minority who grew up in the Middle East, I never really felt like I fit in. After 10 years of living in the U.S., I don't identify as American either and simultaneously feel distanced from the culture I left behind

The notion of the global nomad is often romanticized, but the reality of a peripatetic existence carries its share of angst along with the enrichment it affords. I wonder what it must be like for my parents to consider setting up roots in a completely alien culture with no social network (my sister and I hope that they will eventually settle in North America). I wonder if things would be different if my parents never left India to begin with. Perhaps my sister and I would not have had the multicultural exposure that has made us into tolerant, world-wise, artsy intellectuals, but would we have a stronger sense of belonging? Would things have been easier for my parents without the need to relocate after their retirement?

In June 1971, a skinny newly-wed boarded a plane for the first time along with her physician husband. They would make a short flight across the Arabian Sea to the island State of Bahrain. It was a small step for that couple, but it would forever change history as I know it.

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