Growing up in an Indian household, there were certain things that were second nature to me. Smelling my mom’s paranthas on Sunday mornings, going to the Gurdwara or Mandir Friday evenings, or listening to whatever new song was featured in the latest Bollywood movie, and singing along to it any and every car ride with my dad. Passionately.
Like many first generation kids, my parents were not born in America, but left their families, and roots back in India to come to this foreign place for a better future for my little brother and me, and undoubtedly that is what they have given us. Because of them we were able to grow up in a safe neighborhood, attend a good school district, and have the opportunity to go to college and pursue our dreams whatever those may be (as long as it’s a doctor, lawyer, or engineer.. Just kidding!) Along with these opportunities, they’ve raised us surrounded by the culture, religion, and traditions they grew up with and brought with them here, allowing us to experience the best of both worlds, Indian and American.
While I’ve picked up my parent’s native languages from years of listening to them speak, watching movies, and listening to songs, I am nothing close to perfect. I’ll forget, and I’ll mispronounce, and I’ll switch back to English because that’s what comes more naturally to me. I can tell you how to make barbecue chicken, and pasta, and salmon, but I couldn’t tell you how to make chicken tikka, or saag, or daal. I can walk past Indian graduate students speaking to each other in Hindi on campus every day, and smile to myself because I can understand their conversation, and feel a sense of connectedness to them, yet simultaneously feel so far removed from them, as if they could have been my friends in another life, or as if I am seeing my own parents in their beginning years in America.
And that is disheartening. Because it means somewhere between my parents leaving India and raising me, things fell through the cracks. Practices that I admired, and maybe sometimes took for granted growing up are getting lost in translation and lost in time, which prevents me as well as many other first generation children from being able to pass those onto our children someday. It means that while I’ve experienced the best of both worlds, I couldn’t tell you which world I belong most in.
What I hope for my future children, and the future children of all us first generation kids, is that nothing else falls through the cracks or gets lost in translation. I hope that the idea of India is not some place on their bucket list to travel, but a second home. I hope when they’re away at college they’ll crave home-cooked Indian food, and miss the smell of paranthas on a Sunday morning. I hope that they’ll curl up and watch a classic Bollywood movie every now and then. Above all, I hope the world my parents flew away from all those years ago never gets forgotten by my generation or the generations to come, because those are the roots that connect us to each other, no matter how many thousands of miles away they may be.
