D*SPLACED

Moving from Muscat, Oman to Mumbai, India was like moving from a sleepy faraway cottage in the countryside to a high rise in a bustling city. Muscat is the sleepy, towny, cosy city where your friends know your grandmother’s name, where pongal is celebrated with as much fervour as is Hanukkah. While Mumbai is a city in random motion. Sometimes Mumbai shows purpose…other times its chaotic is a blissful ignorant way. When I first moved, I hated the adjustment and the frequent smoke, the easy friendships, the pani puri made with dirty hands. Today, its home. It matters and it keeps me running on smoke…packed trains and yummilicious pani puri.. Muscat is an like an old classic in your aunt’s cellar and Mumbai is like a bestseller chick-lit that mirrors your life and your laughs. Both are dear to my heart.

- Rebah Chougle Muscat- Mumbai

Very often, I think about why I chose to not stay in India. I grew up outside of India – returning only in the summers for vacation. I loved the feeling of going to India for the summer and the excitement of leaving it at the end of summer. When I was younger, my reasons for not wanting to stay in India where the same as anyone who had had a taste of life outside of India – in America and Europe. I left India with very black and white ideas about what I wanted in life - money, success and the ability to come back to India the way I did when I was growing up. I wanted to return like I did when I was in school - long enough to remember and short enough to forget.

In the nine years since I have ventured from home, I find myself thinking of India almost every day. My thoughts have turned grey and are loosing their edge. No longer do I know what I want and no longer do I want to go home to feel the joy of arrival and excitement of departure. Now when I think I of India and what I have left behind; it reminds of who I am. Today my feeling is one of longing – a longing to be in the company of those I love, of those who love me in a land which I forsaked for a land which I have now adopted. Most importantly, I now understand that this longing will never be fulfilled and that I will always return. I don’t know when and I don’t know how but I now know for sure.

- Rithesh Menon, Muscat – Calicut – Philadelphia – New York