Amairika or Amreeka

We are back. The boxes can only be found in the garage. The brats are back in school and we are back to work. The brats are even back to putting their plates in the sink, making their beds, and doing other chores that they had delegated to the help in India (in spite of strict instructions otherwise).

There is no balcony, and no one serves us hot coffee or tea. The infrequent date nights are all too short. There are certainly no "relaxed weekends at the bookstore".

We miss being able to talk about Hrithik or Aish. We miss being able to mix Hindi and English and Tamil in a single sentence. We miss not having to give cultural context to a joke. We miss India.

On the other hand, we feel more empowered here to make choices. We feel more confident about helping our children learn to be responsible citizens of the world. We feel relieved not to have to walk a fine line between convenience and corruption (of civic sense, of law, of moral values, of other forms). At an abstract level, we like our life as Americans enough to choose it over the balcony and the decoction coffee (though we remember those every weekend and let out a sigh of resignation)

Will we always be in this trisangu like all other immigrant Indian families we made fun of when we came here first?

Will we, like them, try to create a mini-India for our children that is rooted in the past and has no relation to what India has become today?

Will we, like them, live in a time warp?