My last trip to India was eight years ago, in the summer of 2016. Drake had just released Views. I was dating either my first or second or third high school girlfriend depending on what counts as a relationship before you can vote. My sister showed me how to download music on Spotify so you could listen to it without connection. I used it to download Views. That was the summer that everyone was playing Pokemon Go, except for me because I never got into Pokemon, and that made me feel left out in America, but I didn’t realize that it would also make me feel left out that summer in India. People were playing Pokemon Go there too. That was the first indication that neither country my family called home was really that different. The second was that we were still going to McDonalds. It was the main tourist attraction in Chennai, since we wanted to see how they adjusted the menu to include no beef. I didn’t eat meat then. People said 2016 was a great year for music. I think 2024 was better. On this year’s trip to India, I saved GNX by Kendrick Lamar, Chromakopia by Tyler the Creator, and When The Pawn by Fiona Apple to listen to on the plane. Fiona Apple didn’t drop music in 2024, but her music was still good in 2024. It’s been eight years since my last trip to India. I was 17 last time, now I’m 25. I’ve graduated high school since then, I got my college degree, I’m on my second lease in Los Angeles. Last time I was in India, my family all flew together, from Michigan. This time, my sister came from New York City, my parents from Atlanta, and I came from LA. They flew East, I went West. Eight years ago, we mainly stayed in Chennai, with my dad’s eldest sister, Vilasini Athai, and her family. We also stayed with my Patti and Thatha in their apartment. Since our last trip to India, my Athai passed away. My Thatha passed away. Nobody lives in Chennai anymore.
We began our trip in Bangalore, where my eldest cousin, Raksha Didi, has lived with her family since Vilasini Athai, her mother, passed away. She has her own little kid now, who I think of as my first nephew. Some people say the child of your cousin is another cousin, but I think that’s wrong. I’ve had younger cousins before, and this is not that. He’s solidly of another generation. And I want to be old enough to be an uncle.
Going to India has always kept me aware of my own Americanness. I never managed to learn Tamil or Hindi- not even to the extent that I could “understand, but not speak,” like many diaspora kids, including my sister. It’s one of the many factors that’s made me feel, perpetually, like a Bad American Son. Memories of cities we visited several years ago have largely slipped from my mind. The names of members of my extended family struggle to materialize in my head when we meet, along with the knowledge of how exactly we’re related. I find it hard to follow every rule about what’s polite and respectful, especially those that feel arbitrary or hypocritical. But one of the good parts about being 25, and not 17, is that I see much less value in being ashamed, at all, about anything. This time around, I was aware that I was coming to India as a visitor, and I didn’t feel bad about that.
Which is not to say that I don’t love India, nor feel a connection to my ancestry there, especially given all my family that still lives there. But I get suspicious of the tendency to make a place more beautiful by obscuring it. I don’t think that’s possible. I think India is much more than mango slices and humidity and coconut trees: the summation, it feels sometimes, of the fantasy embraced by desi kids living in Manhattan. India is also the home to complex political realities, the result of governing 500+ distinct kingdoms under a single flag. India is home to successes and failures of urban planning. There are older and younger generations addicted to screens, gender roles recognized and rebelled against, class struggle made both very visible and also hidden away, facets of a country just like any other. A place just like here. I feel that to romanticise or orientalize what is a country like any other can obscure reality. I don’t call India “The Motherland.” I was born, ultimately, in Ypsilanti, Michigan. When my parents tell stories from their youth, they mention doors that lock from the outside and life before getting a water heater. Most of my childhood memories took place in the backs of vans that drove 70 miles per hour down the highway, not 50 kilometers. I oftentimes wonder, if all the children of immigrants were called upon to be really honest, where would our roots be, in memory? My parents left Michigan a few years ago, and left India long before that. When I am in India, or Atlanta, or Chicago, or New York, or Los Angeles, or Barcelona, or Singapore, or San Francisco, I know that I am a visitor.
Even so, between trips, different languages and memories from the subcontinent ended up slipping into and taking root in my life. The summer of 2019 was my first time living in Los Angeles. I shared a three bedroom apartment with nine other people, a story that echoes some of my relatives’ first experiences living in the states. I started cooking Indian food that summer, and am yet to stop. The next summer, in Evanston, Illinois, I wrote a play based on Hindu mythologies, and the summer after that, I learned carnatic music on the guitar. Going to the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles was one of my favorite memories from this past summer. I started building a community of filmmakers who are based around the world, including India, and it’s now easier to picture the reality that everywhere in the world exists people just like me. People who have a hard time accepting reality as-is, and seek to live in a new one.
We went to a gorgeous, lavish wedding in Rajasthan, and at some point the father of a groom was giving a speech about his son. He relished in sharing that his son had become a chartered accountant in London, which is basically like completing an MBA, and above all else, praised him for being such an obedient child. I immediately soured, and then soured at my sourness, wondering if this schism in values was more evidence that I am that bad, American son. I’m not the biggest rebel alive, but I hardly consider “obedience” to be a virtue ahead of critical thought towards anything that would ever ask obedience of me. I don’t like to follow a rule I don’t understand, or give respect where it hasn’t been earned. I guess obedience might be part of what defines a conventionally good son, or worker, but that attitude has never been of interest to me. I’d always thought was the main point of being young and intaking literature or punk music or even just the Wikipedia biographies of anyone who really left a mark on the world was that the ability to think for oneself, and thus live as an individual, has always been of paramount importance to doing something distinct with your one life on Earth. And doing something distinct and individual, pursuing the greatest challenge possible: creating whatever kind of life seems like it shouldn’t be possible, is always what I thought the whole purpose of the blessing of the spark of life was.
That said, as I get a little bit older, I wonder if life is meant to be primarily challenging, or primarily enjoyable. I wonder if I’ve become preoccupied and singularly focused on creating and overcoming a challenging life, remiss of more tangible obstacles.
One specific nightmare version of my future life, is that years down the line I’ve ended up getting so wrapped up in my own career, that I end up being distant from those I love, or missing out on crucial moments. I’ve thought that for now, because the scale of my work is still relatively small and independent, that I couldn’t possibly be in danger of living that nightmare version of reality just yet. After all, I have a day job that keeps me at my desk, and theoretically I am able to stay in touch and available. However, trying to keep two careers going definitely means that I am prone to feeling like I’m juggling a lot, and the result is that keeping in touch with those who aren’t in my immediate vicinity is one of the first responsibilities to go. To get everything done that I want to accomplish sometimes requires becoming so efficient, that even the most delicate and loving acts become items on a to-do list. The gap between me and my loved ones grows, and then the distance reinforces itself. That makes me wonder what a challenging life is really worth.
On some level, I expected that the first time I would visit India as an adult, it would be hard for people to understand my life in Los Angeles. Harboring a complex that I’ve strayed from a respectable life path has made me a bit overly sensitive to perceived judgements. None of these sentiments were validated. Everyone was interested in the magic of making movies. No one seemed to wonder why I wasn’t further along in my career, or looked down on me for still working a day job. They didn’t seem to care that I’ve only done independent work at this point. And despite the fact that no one in my family shares this career path, living an adult life means that most of our days are spent doing exactly the same things: feeding ourselves and bathing, trying to stay healthy and being on our phones. The harshest sentiment I got was the loving request that I be better about staying in touch.
I never have less doubt than when I’m assuaging other people’s doubts. I’ve learned that you can inspire a lot of confidence in people by touting your ambition instead of your experience: which feels backwards, but I don’t know what “forwards” means anymore. While helping Raksha Didi run an errand, we stopped by a neighbor’s house and I sat down with their Patti. She asked me about my career, and I told her that I was an actor and producer making film and theatre in LA. She asked me how far I wanted to take things. I was surprised, momentarily taken aback that someone could be unclear as to my own ambitions, and also that I could be given the license of dream in front of her. I told her, as far and as high as I can possibly go.
At another point that week, a cousin asked how much money I made from creative work, which is a question that pokes a hole through my arrogance. That’s when I must admit to my frustrating personal philosophy, which is that I try to make as much of what I do as completely free as possible. I mean, I do get paid to act most of the time, and I might start charging a participation fee for RIFF, my filmmaking festival, just to offset the cost of production. But as I mentioned in a previous newsletter, Animals Out of Paper, the play I produced in October, was entirely free to attend. Any money we made through donations was used to pay our designers, and we donated the rest to families in Palestine. Ideally, you will never pay to read this newsletter. That just defeats the purpose for me. I don’t think these actions mean that I lack a business mindset either. My business is, simply, to give people as much as I possibly can for free, for as long as humanly possible.
The last time I was in India, we stayed mainly in two places. The first was at Vilasini Athai’s apartment. At this point, Raksha Didi was living with her. We also stayed at my grandparents apartment. That was eight years ago. In 2020, Vilasini Athai passed away from pancreatic cancer. In 2023, Ambi Thatha passed away too. Both apartments we stayed at the last time we were in India are gone. This time, we stayed with my Raksha Didi, as she now runs a family of her own. She has a kid between three and four years, who I call my nephew. Some people debate what constitutes a nephew. I’ve had younger cousins, and I think this is solidly different. He’s of another generation. He’s really smart. He loves machinery. One of his earliest interests was the exhaust fans that ventilate a kitchen or bathroom. Now he loves construction vehicles and racecars. He never knew Vilasini Athai, and I think that’s a shame.
A lot changes in eight years. The oldest generation of my family is slowly leaving us, and my eldest cousins are all adults now. Watching my oldest cousin now as a parent, I saw so many glimpses of my Athai, alive through her daughter, raising her son. Late at night, I walked around the apartment compound with my eldest male cousin. We walked in silence, and I thought it was because I must have done something wrong. I tried to fill the silence until I realized, eventually, that we weren’t speaking because we were two adult men on a walk, and perhaps that’s just how adult men were supposed to be. I wasn’t a child anymore who needed to be entertained, as much as I wanted to be. I wondered if we weren’t speaking because of how it felt to hear the wind rustling heavily through the trees at night. Maybe that didn’t need to be disturbed.
I was the last member of my family to leave India, but I didn’t do so without a fight. When we said goodbye, I burst into tears. Those new lessons about masculinity were forgotten quickly, the glue of stoicism that held me together instantly liquidated, along with the rest of my face, as I thought about everything that will change again by the next time I see my family in India: especially for my little nephew, who changes so much every single week. I lost beloved people and places between my last visits, and what else might be gone by the next time I go back?
My cousins told me to come visit soon, and I cried more, because the truth of the matter is that it’s hard to visit, especially when my life already feels strained between so many compromises. My day job is flexible enough that I can pursue two careers, and the tradeoff is that a plane ticket to India is still no small expense for me. People ask the question of what “making it” means in an economy that hardly lets anyone call themselves “comfortable,” but in this moment, I could not have a clearer idea of what I’m working toward. Telling our neighbor that I’m shooting as high and as far as I can possibly go means, for me, a life with time for the people I love, wherever they might be in the world. Because I can admit that the hypothetical nightmare of a life so attached to my work and independence that I stay isolated from my loved ones is not a potential consequence of future success so much as it is my current reality. In working so hard to be a success, I totally missed that people who love me are not so hard to impress.
I said goodbye to my cousins, who each have created incredible adult lives, to go back to my own, which I’m only just starting to get the hang of. The entire way back to the states, I cried and cried. I tried to replay the last words my cousin said as I was leaving: something about how proud she is of me, and how stable I am for my age. She told me that someone else would be proud of me too, but I couldn’t quite hear her through my own tears. She might’ve referenced my grandmother, who I never knew, or maybe her mother, who recently passed away. That might’ve made more sense, but the memory has already slipped through my fingers like sand. Like a bad, American son, I recall the memory and I break it, as I will do with most of the memories we shared this December, as I do with all memories constantly. Left behind, through the dust, only the sense that something special was shared, a certainty of love that will not erode with time.
this is beautiful rishi <3
Love this