Was It Worth It?

Sep 15

The walk to my Pilates class takes about twelve minutes. I have been going to the class for seven years and walking there for the last four, and in that time, it has never once been the same walk twice.

Some seasons there is metro construction and the route bends around hoardings. In the monsoon I usually do not walk at all, because the lane outside my building becomes something you pick your way through rather than walk along. On an ordinary dry morning there is rubbish. There are the leavings of animals, and sometimes of people. There are vendors set up where the footpath was. There are long stretches where the footpath has been dug up and not replaced.

I have thought about that walk more than it deserves. What I keep landing on is a small, specific wish: I would like, just once, to walk to Pilates along a clean green path. Twelve unremarkable minutes of a thing I used to have without noticing I had it.

What I miss

I walked a great deal in California, and I notice its absence most days.

We lived in Palo Alto, and I walked California Avenue and University Avenue the way you walk a street you know, with no particular destination and always something worth looking at. When I was up in San Francisco it was the city itself. There were hills, which I never minded. What there always was, everywhere, was a path. Somewhere to put your feet that somebody had built for the purpose and maintained since.

Here I walk loops in the municipal garden next to my building, which is genuinely well kept and which I am glad exists. But a loop is not a walk. There is no destination in it. I am going nowhere on purpose, in the one stretch of pavement nearby that works.

I miss northern California winters, and the specific clean cold of that air. And I miss what sat within four hours of my door. Tahoe for the snow. Yosemite for the rest of it. I did a great deal of hiking in those years, with friends who loved it as much as I did, and we got up Half Dome and Lassen and Mission Peak and a long list of others. It became one of my favorite things to do with people I liked.

I miss slow weekend mornings and eating breakfast outside without a plan. And underneath most of it, I miss predictability. A life where the parts you did not want to think about mostly worked and left you free to think about the rest.

I am not going to pretend I have made peace with that. Nine years in, on a bad morning, I still want the clean path.

The loss I have not found a way around

All of that, though, I can argue myself out of on a good day.

The one I cannot is the people. Not acquaintances. The family we had chosen and assembled over twenty years, who were the witnesses to our ordinary weeks. People who had known me long enough that I did not have to explain myself, who could tell from my face what kind of week it had been, and who knew what I needed without my having to work out how to ask for it.

You do not rebuild that in a decade. I have close friends here now, one or two of whom I would call at two in the morning without thinking about it. But twenty years of shared history is twenty years, and there is no shortcut through it. That is the loss I expect to carry for the rest of my life. I knew it was coming. Nobody had to warn me. I decided the reasons for going were strong enough anyway, and I still think they were, which is a different thing from it not costing anything.

The two years I do not talk about much

The hardest stretch came early, and it was not about infrastructure.

For the first two years we lived with my parents while I worked in my father's business. I ate with them, worked with them and lived with them, and I was lonely in a way I had not been since I was fourteen. Gaurav was my only real friend here. Almost everyone else I met; I met through him. In California we had a full life, events and dinners and people who came over on a Saturday without it being an occasion, and we could host without thinking about it. Here I had to build all of that from nothing, in my thirties, in a city I was from.

This has a shape, and it is well documented, and I went through the middle of it without knowing there was a name for what was happening. The friction arrives after the excitement wears off, which is to say at the exact moment you think you are settling.

I never thought the move itself was a mistake. Janvi did, more than once, and there were stretches where her doubt got into me and I wavered. What steadied me each time was going back to the reason we came, which was specific and had not changed. But the person beside me was not always sure, and any version of this story that leaves that out is a tidier story than the one we lived.

What we were given

What turned it was the children, and what came with them was much larger than anything I had planned for.

We had talked, before we came, about raising a family near my parents. That was the reason, and it was a good one, and it turned out to be the smallest part of what actually happened.

What I did not anticipate is how much of the value would be in things too ordinary to have put on a list. My parents doing unremarkable things with my children. Not occasions, not visits, just being in the same rooms often enough that none of it is special. Being at the birthdays and the anniversaries that nobody would have flown anywhere for and having my parents at ours for the same reason.

What I also did not anticipate is what it would do for them. My parents have a reason to be well that they did not have before, and I think it has made them look after themselves more carefully than they otherwise would. There is research suggesting that grandparents who look after grandchildren regularly, without it becoming the whole job, live longer than those who do not. I am not going to lean on a study for this. I can see it.

Then there is taking a Wednesday morning off to go to the beach with the children, because nothing was stopping me. I can take a day to watch cricket. I can start a Monday at noon because I was up until three in the morning watching American football.

The part that is easier to see from outside is the calendar. Ganesh Chaturthi has just finished. Diya and Samay watched the pandals go up across the city, went to the homes of friends and family who had brought Ganpati in this year, ate the sweets that only exist during those days, and felt a whole city organize itself around one thing for ten days. Rakshabandhan comes round every year, and because of it they understand what it is to have a brother or a sister in a way I could not teach them deliberately. And there is Diwali, which is the nearest thing I can compare to Christmas in America, except that it runs across several days, every household keeps it slightly differently, and the whole city lights up at once. For us it carries the feeling of a year turning over, because it does. The Gujarati New Year begins the morning after. And Holi, which we have kept in a doubled form since the year we landed, once in our own building in the morning and again ten minutes away at Gaurav's in the afternoon, which my children have never known to be anything else.

The monsoon is the one I had forgotten entirely, and it is an event rather than weather. It arrives on roughly the same days each June and the whole city turns to face it. The first rain has a smell that my children already recognize, and I had not smelled in twenty years. Schools shut. The sea comes over the wall at the seafront. For about three months everything is wetter and slower and louder, and the two of them are out in it in gumboots and raincoats, enacting the live version of Peppa and George jumping in muddy puddles, entirely delighted, with no sense that any of it is remarkable. Weather in California was superb, and it was one of the best things about living there. What it was not was an event. Here it is something that happens to everybody at once, and my children are inside it rather than being told about it.

None of that, though, is what tipped the decision. The festivals and the monsoon are the parts that photograph well. What tipped it is the accumulation of Wednesdays, and underneath the Wednesdays is something I did not expect to find here at all.

I have more control over my own week in Mumbai than I ever had in California. It took years to build and the country did not hand it to me, and I am aware of how strange it sounds after everything I have said about pavements. But I gave up a country that runs on rules and got back, eventually, a week that runs on mine.

None of that was on the spreadsheet. I moved for proximity to two people, and what my children got was a whole way of living.

The thing I had backwards

It took me most of a decade to see the shape of all of that, and when I did, it was the opposite of what I had assumed.

Everything on my list of losses was something built. The path was built and maintained. The trailheads were where somebody had put them. The predictability was engineered by people who had been engineering it for a century. And the friends were the result of twenty years of turning up, which is its own kind of construction. All of it was made, and most of it I had some hand in making.

Everything on the other side of the ledger arrived without my building anything. The festivals were already happening. The village around my children assembled itself. A Saturday ritual I do not understand and did not choose has claimed me anyway, in a temple queue in Juhu, and my week feels wrong without it now.

I spent my first years here trying to rebuild what I had, which was the wrong project entirely. You cannot construct the second kind of life by working harder at the first. And you cannot replace the first by being handed the second. They are different things, and the move gets you one in exchange for the other.

Whose ledger this is

A fair amount of why mine balanced the way it did is circumstance rather than insight, and a fair amount of that circumstance is a safety net my parents spent their working lives building. It would be dishonest to leave either out.

I came back to the city I am from, to parents who were alive and nearby and in reasonable health, with a partner who wanted the same thing, into a family business that gave me somewhere to stand while I worked out what I was doing. We had two small children soon after, which handed us the readymade society that school and neighbors and festivals build around young families. And we had enough money that the things I have complained about in this essay stayed annoyances rather than becoming constraints. Change any one of those and the arithmetic moves.

The most common version of this return is not mine at all. The job is in Bangalore or Pune or Gurgaon, and the parents you came back for are five hundred kilometers away in the town you grew up in. You get the country without the village. The food is right, the language is right, the festivals happen around you, and you still have to build a social life from nothing in a city where you know three colleagues. What you gain is a short flight to your parents instead of a long one, which sounds like a small thing until somebody is in hospital. What you do not get is the part I have been describing, the village that arrives on its own. You have to go out and assemble one.

Come back without a partner or children and none of the machinery I leaned on applies. No school gate, no other parents, nothing that builds you a social circle while you are busy with something else. The two years I described tend to run longer and harder. What sits on the other side is real, though. Proximity to ageing parents that you do not have to negotiate with anybody. A life in the middle of a city rather than wherever the schools are. And a family network that will ask you intrusive questions for decades and also turn up the day something goes wrong.

Some people do all of this and go back. I know several who gave India three or four years, honestly and with effort, and then returned. Sometimes a career does not survive the move, or a parent dies and the reason you came is no longer there, or you find out you valued the predictability a great deal more than you had believed. That is a legitimate answer to the same honest question. Ten weeks of essays could easily imply otherwise, and they should not.

The honest accounting

I did not get to keep everything. I gave up clean air, working infrastructure, easy mountains, and the enormous, underrated luxury of a life that mostly runs itself. Some of that I will never stop missing.

The clean green path to Pilates is not coming, and I have stopped waiting for it.

What I got instead does not compensate for those things. It is a different kind of life altogether, and the difference is not that there is less order in it. The year has a shape I did not design, and my children are inside something rather than adjacent to it. The week, oddly, is more mine than it has ever been. I do not get to decide the calendar here and I do get to decide the days, which is the exact reverse of what I had in California.

Both sides of that ledger are made of small, repeated things. A walk I do not get to take, most mornings. A Wednesday I do get to take, some weeks. Nobody decides a move like this on one enormous consideration, whatever they say afterwards. You are weighing the texture of one ordinary life against the texture of another, which is why it is so hard to think about clearly and so easy to get wrong in both directions.

A good decision is not one without loss. It is one you can build a life around. That is the test, not whether it was easy, but whether it was worth it.

Mine was. That is not the same as saying it will be yours, and this whole series has been an argument against anyone deciding that for you.

Something to sit with

The Five-Year Look-Back is the last of these tools, and the one that asks the most of you. Several of the others are reflective, and several ask you to write something down. This one asks you to write something you will have to live up to.

It puts you five years into the return and asks you to write back to the person you are today. What you hope you will have built by then. What you are afraid you might have lost. What you want to have given, to your children, to your parents, to the place itself. There is nothing to score and nothing to compare yourself against.

I would do it now, before you decide, and then again, a year after you land. The gap between those two versions will tell you more than any of the other nine tools put together.

The rest of the territory

Module 9 of the India Life Blueprint is the last one, and it is about the life rather than the logistics. It covers reverse culture shock properly, including why the hard part arrives later than you expect. It covers the heat, which returnees consistently underestimate, and the rhythm the seasons give back to a year. And it covers the daily texture of the place, privacy as a different concept here, the festival calendar, and the obligations that come attached to being claimed by people.

That is the end of my part of this series. Ten weeks, nine modules, and one question underneath all of it, which was never whether India is a good country or a difficult one. It is both. The question was what kind of life you are trying to build, and whether this is the place to build it.

There is one more piece coming, and it is not mine. Shruti, who brought her dog from New Jersey to Mumbai and learned the whole process the hard way, is writing the guide to moving a pet. I have never had one, and she has, so it belongs to her.

One last question to carry with you: What is the life you are actually trying to build, and does it need to be built here?

In honest company,

— Rumit

Rumit Kanakia