Prologue: propose your theory

I begin at carbon.

Time goes by and I wonder what parts of me are like the rings of a tree that I can come back to count.

I begin at the earth’s orbit.

Time goes by and I cannot decide if I would rather dance through the monsoon, watch marigolds bloom, or pounce on a pile of sugar maple leaves.

I begin at evolution.

Time goes by and I wonder what I have inherited to escape extinction and what will become of me next.

 

Memoir: perform your experiments

I

In India, community is a way of life. Tradition dictates co-existence in large “joint families,” and this is where I began. Until the age of six, I did not leave this world.

VI

At the age of six, my family moved to Belgium, where I spent the next eight years at a British school. Here, I escaped bullies by playing with bugs instead and fended off the freezing weather with the excitement of first snowfalls. I learnt to hike the Black Forest Mountains and orienteer in the woods surrounding a former Belgian palace. Most importantly, it was in Belgium that I found the taste buds in me dedicated to odorous cheese.

XIV

At the age of fourteen, moving back to India did not feel like moving back home. Joint families were being dismissed as impractical and careers swallowed us. While we still fussed fondly over each other in the family, we now often had to let Skype be our proxy. I found new comforts in watching monsoon showers and learnt to keep windows closed, lest a monkey should stroll in and help itself to the bananas I’d saved for myself.

XVIII

At the age of eighteen, I took off once again, but this time alone, to the United States for four years of college. In this journey, first year’s excitement countered second year’s homesickness, while third year’s adventurous spirit clashed with fourth year’s unyielding demands to deliver a relentless work ethic. I learnt over potlucks and poetry readings that my new sisters would be from every continent and I wouldn’t try to hide the tears when alumnae came back with touching stories of how their best friends decades on were the Smithies they grew up with.

XXI

At the age of twenty-one, I returned to Europe for a semester in London. This city grew to be the melting pot that merged my childhood and adolescent homes, churning out a savoury mélange. While I let myself revel here in the British slang I had grown up with, I puzzled over how unbelievably at home I felt in this city I had never before lived in. Yet, I yearned for the sisterhood I had at Smith and the sense of community I had with my family in India.

 

Epilogue: analyze your results

What changes during each move is not the skeleton from which I am composed, the species to which I belong, or the axis on which my world rotates. Instead, what living abroad – although I could not tell you where abroad is anymore – has taught me is to embrace. Travel has the transformative power to breed new tongues, new friendships, and new outlooks. But travel also turns the lights on stark truths and uncomfortable realizations. Chapter XVIII was my greatest challenge despite it being lived in my first home. What stood in the way of my re-assimilation was an unfair expectation that time and evolution had paused in the eight years that I had lived away. However, during my recent return to Europe, to my second home, what played in my favor was a faith in the place to offer me what it had, rather than demand of it what I thought it ought to have. And it was thus that we lived in a state of symbiosis.

If there’s one thing I carry with me, it’s the habit to never say goodbye when I leave each new place I’ve imbibed. There is only ever “I will leave and be back,”for in Tamil, my mother tongue, that is what we say when parting. We will not leave people or places behind, but rather take them along and revisit them when we are miles away and desperately in need of a slice of home.

 

Krithika Venkataraman considers herself a modern nomad, pausing to think each time when asked where home is. Home, for her, spans three continents and her assimilation and re-assimilation across these has been purely organic, much like the molecules she studies as a student of biochemistry and neuroscience. As a citizen of the 21st century, she is witnessing a beautiful move towards a global culture, and it is to this culture that she belongs.

 

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