Now that we’ve been home for a few weeks, I can say that there are things I miss about India.  One of them is our friend and driver Rupesh.  We had lots of occasion to chat with him as we sat in traffic.  He was our guide and intermediary to a new culture; his questions and his answers to our own questions made us think. 

One conversation we had early on was about our “native place.”  Most Indians have one – an ancestral village or neighborhood where their relatives still live, and to which they return.  Having a native place is a vital link beyond kinship to its residents – it’s an attachment to the actual area and the land itself.  People are intensely proud of their native places, and follow everything that affects those places with great interest, even if they themselves are living in a city, far away.

Rupesh spoke with great affection about his native place, describing the house he grew up in, the retirement house his parents were building there, village life,his family, and the crops grown in his family’s various small fields.  Then he asked me about mine.  Where was it?  What was it like?  What grew there?

I admit I was at a loss.  Like many rootless urban Americans, we have no single place for the family to call home.

I suppose technically speaking, an avenue row house in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn New York would be my native place.  We lived there until I was a teen, around the corner from one grandparents’ house and about 10 minutes away from the other.

The shot at right is as it looks now on Google Maps – not quite the same as I remember, but even digitally, one can’t turn back time.  Rupesh would be disappointed to know that very little grew there, at least not by the time my family lived there.  Truck garden farms and horse stables for the local race track had long since been paved over and subdivided into attached houses.

While I have deep memories of Brooklyn, walking to school and the neighborhood in which I lived, I have no particular attachment to it.  I barely remember the people I went to school with, and have not been back there in a good 30 years.

Next we lived in Teaneck, New Jersey.  That lasted from middle school through high school.  Again, an inner suburb, not quite as dense as Brooklyn, but long divorced from being anything other than a bedroom community.  I do have fond memories of several school friends, and am debating attending an upcoming high school reunion.  For agriculture, I did once try to grow carrots in the back yard.  I got leafy tops, but no roots.  So both I and the vegetables have no special ties to that little plot, either. My mom no longer lives there, so there’s no compelling reason to return.

After that I went off to college, and a wild array of ever-changing dorm rooms.  Nothing much settled down in the immediate post-college years, either.  I bounced from one Boston area entry level apartment to another, sharing the places with roommates or roaches.  Usually both.

I wouldn’t call any of these residences home, let alone my special native place.

Eventually I ended up in Washington D.C., jobs being more plentiful there than in Boston in the early 1980s.  I will be forever grateful to the friends who let me couch surf in their tiny apartment for five months before I established myself and could afford to move to my own flat.  Fernando and I married and he joined me in my war against vermin in this College Park, Maryland building.

Getting closer, but still no nostalgia.  We moved to get away from the Roach Motel, and resettled in Washington, D.C. itself, in a small apartment village in Takoma Park.  It was pleasant, although  not air conditioned in the D.C. heat, and an easy walk to the subway, the dojo and many of our friends. The best part was the low rent, which allowed us to save up to buy our first non-apartment home.

We are now inching up on Rupesh’s concept of attachment.  We worked hard on the house in Lanham, Maryland, and made very good friends with a neighbor, with whom we remain in touch to this day.  Our elder daughter was born here.  Through hard work, we tamed the muddy back yard and grew lots of flowers – cannas, mums, day lilies, Asian lilies, hollyhocks, marigolds, and others.  I’d consider this to be our first real home.

Better jobs beckoned, and we returned to Massachusetts. 
We did a lot of research and ended up buying our next home in Arlington – a tiny 1950s era ranch.  Again, we did a lot of work on the house and grounds, finishing out the basement, making a garden in the back.  I attempted cucumbers, garlic and herbs, with equivocal success.  Younger daughter was born here, and we quickly grew out of the the place.

We liked Arlington, so we ended up staying here in town, but in a larger home – a 1912-vintage arts and crafts style stucco bungalow.  We’ve been here for about 8 years now, and are still making improvements to it, slowly turning back 80 years of semi-neglect. We dabble in gardening, and have grown strawberries, climbing beans, and onions.

Now, with all of these places I’ve lived in over the years (and mind you, I’ve omitted quite a few short term spots), it’s no wonder I was cast into thought about the meaning of having a “native place.”  Both Fernando’s and my parents no longer live in the houses in which we grew up.  We have no links back to any of our old neighborhoods.  Our siblings, friends, and distant family are similarly scattered all over the US (with a few overseas). 

I had the impression that Rupesh felt slightly sorry for us and slightly confused by my answers, because we really had no geographic center of identity, attachment and affection.  I am quite fond of our current home. Perhaps that may qualify as our native place now, but I prefer to think of this family as carrying our native place with us.  My roots are shallow and easily transplanted. Although I love this house, if I had to go elsewhere, I would move.  My identity is built more on my family’s ethical and moral legacy, what I have made myself into, what I have done, and what we as our own nuclear family have become. 

So I guess my native place is my own dinner table.  Wherever that may happen to be.