One Heart, Two Homes

The Age

Monday February 7, 2005

By Clare Boyd-Macrae

More people than ever seem to end up living somewhere other than where they started: from highly skilled, destined-to-be-prosperous migrants who are welcomed with open arms, to the poor brave souls on boats who battle unspeakable odds to escape persecution and death. People are on the move, the world over.

I try to imagine that, just for one day, one week, all of us who had shifted looked like the natives of the place from which we had come. Or magpie-like, piebald. What a richly coloured, variegated world this would be, and how confusing for those who wish to divide people up into colours or costumes or religions, and treat them accordingly: you over here are welcome, those others of you over there can stay behind barbed wire.

For there are many of us, in this country and everywhere, who look just like the majority but really we're half of something else. Just because you can't see it, it doesn't mean it's not real.

This is not mere sentimentality. Statements such as JFK's "Ich bin ein Berliner" make me sceptical but scratch my surface and I am a Gujarati, from western India, almost as much as I'm an Anglo-Celtic Aussie.

Both my father and his father worked in India. At different times, they lived in the same house. My parents were there for 20 years, during which time I was born and grew up. As a young woman based in Australia, I went back repeatedly. Every time I saved up enough money, back I'd go, until a troop of children grounded me, in more ways than one.

For 20 years, then, I thought less and less about the land of my birth. I was subsumed in marriage, child-rearing, inner and outer work. India was always there, but not consciously so.

A year ago, I went back. I stayed in the house where my grandparents had lived, and then my parents, where I had grown up, played, learnt to talk, learnt to read. There were many people there who knew me well. When I emailed to ask if I could come, the closest friend I retained from my earlier years wrote: "You can come and stay for as long as you want. This is your second home. We are your Gujarati family."

Nice sentiments. But as soon as I got off the plane and drove to our house and was greeted by so many friends, I knew there was deep truth in his assertion. When I felt the heavy heat; smelled the combination of flowers, sewage, rubbish and spices; heard the "chai chai chai", the incessant honking of horns and the deep hawking followed by a hefty spit; I felt alive in a way I hadn't for 20 years. My senses all sat up and took notice. I was home.

There were surprises over the next week as we had breakfast, lunch and dinner with old friends and explored old haunts. Things that would have bothered me in Australia - dirt, dodgy plumbing, inefficiency, having to queue endlessly for the simplest things, the heat, noise and insane driving - didn't bother me at all in India.

And the language returned with a vengeance. In Melbourne, I am hard put to remember three words of Gujarati. Here, I was blathering away, no doubt ungrammatically, but well enough to make myself clearly understood. Two days after our arrival, my daughter dropped a glass and I said to a friend, "there's a broken glass in there, be careful". I had no idea that I even remembered those words.

I understood a lot more than I could speak. We went to church and the familiar religious phrases washed over me like long-loved nursery rhymes. We sat through interminable Gujarati church services, in intense heat, and I didn't care. I just soaked it all up.

We wanted to go to a night market very close to our house where there are rows of stalls, mainly selling the brightly coloured, mirror-work clothes and fabrics for which Gujarat is famous. Our local friends warned us not to go on our own: "If you must go alone, they said, don't speak any English. And whatever price they ask you, say you'll give them half. No, less than half".

We took our courage in both hands and set out the next evening. I was nervous, I hadn't haggled for years. I'm not very assertive in shops in Melbourne. Within less than a minute, a young man trailed some brightly coloured bauble before me. "One hundred rupees madam," he said.

"One hundred rupees? I'll give you 10!" I said in Gujarati.

He grinned, in great good humour, asked me how I knew the language and, "which country are you coming from?" Then he said 80 rupees. I said nup, I was sticking to my original offer.

Eventually I waved him off and walked away, whereupon he said, laughing, "Okay madam, 10 rupees." I bought half a dozen; we chatted some more, and parted, the best of friends.

We were eating with our friends the next day, and showed them our booty. They asked nervously, how much we'd paid, and I went through every item. They laughed delightedly, saying, "You are a real Gujarati".

Of course it was unrealistic, and they were being kind, and, of course, Australia is my home. But put me back where I first belonged and I become uncannily Indian again, as my husband noted to his surprise the first time we travelled the subcontinent together. And that part of me is as real as the part that loves Australia and knows that it, too, is home.

I am both: I am an Aussie and also a Gujarati. And there must be thousands of people the world around, who grew up in a country or a culture that was not that of their parents. If only you could see it on our skin, on our faces, in the way we dressed, emblazoned on our foreheads. How confusing that would be. How colourful. How glorious.

Clare Boyd-Macrae is a Melbourne writer.

© 2005 The Age

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