Dilemma of an expat
Reviewed by Aradhika Sharma


Return to India. 
Shoba Narayan, 
Rain Tree. Pages 269. 
Rs 395.

Return to India is the story of an expat family that decides to return to India. The tale describes how the 18-year-old, starry eyed Shobha made her way to America, set up a life and profession there, got married, had two daughters — Malini and Ranjini and lived there for 20 years. And then, one day, the family decided to return, lock, stock and barrel, home to their motherland.

In her blog, writing about the book and the immigrant phenomena, Narayan says: “My grand ambition with this book is to open the floodgates of reverse migration….My blousy dream, the reason I wrote Return to India, is to cause millions of Indians who are currently living abroad to return to India and become contributing residents.”

Her previous work, Monsoon Diaries, a memoir with recipes was a “delicious, delectable” book, replete with recipes while dealing with the dilemma of the new emigrant to America. In Return to India, she takes the experience forward. One can, in fact, compare the two works, since they are somewhat thematically similar. This book takes off from where the previous one left off.

The book opens with young Shobha raring to go to America, which she sees as the glorious Promised Land, where she could live unfettered and free from her TamBram family and maybe even marry an American. The US of A is where normal “Indian” rules did not apply and where she could make unconventional choices. That dream did come true, since Shobha became a sculpturer, a profession she hadn’t dreamt of taking up when she had left India. Shobha starts waking up from the American dream, realising that she could escape from India but never from her Indian-ness. Every day that she spends adjusting to the American life, she comes across Indian-ness in one form or the other, even in getting married to a boy of her parent’s choice — a green card holder.

After living the American life, the yearning for home sets in. Questions about culture and identity and connections with one’s roots keep cropping up uncomfortably and the family is at crossroads again. To leave the country that has been their home for 20 years. Journey from India and back to India is undertaken; the adjustments that an American-Indian family must make and when returning and changing is not as simple a process as it seems. Written with a wry humour and great simplicity, Return to India, a decidedly personal story, is an easy book to read.

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