Home is one place. And home is a thousand places.

Of longing, belonging and returning.

What does it mean for home to be both one place and a thousand places at once? To feel deeply tethered to a single patch of land - and yet carry pieces of yourself across continents, generations, and borrowed geographies? As the daughter of Indian immigrants raised in the rural Midwest, I’ve always lived in that in-between space. Home has been a place of comfort, memory, and return. And also a place of loss, dislocation, and contradiction. I have been reflecting on that complexity; the way home and homeland can be both anchor and ache, both inheritance and erasure.

A few weeks ago, my husband and I finished the movie, Swades (meaning “my country or my own motherland” in Hindi). The story follows Mohan Bhargava, an Indian-born NASA scientist living in the United States. While thriving professionally, Mohan feels a lingering emotional disconnect from his roots. He decides to return to India to find Kaveri Amma, the woman who raised him and whom he lost touch with after moving abroad. Mohan’s search leads him to Charanpur, a rural village in India, where he finds Kaveri Amma and begins to witness firsthand the social, economic, and infrastructural challenges that local communities face: lack of education, caste-based discrimination, poor electricity access, and rigid traditions. He reconnects with his childhood friend and starts becoming more deeply invested in village life.

As Mohan grapples with his privileged position and the suffering around him, a profound transformation occurs. He realizes that his skills and resources could make a real difference in his homeland. After initially returning to the U.S., he feels disillusioned with his life there and ultimately chooses to come back to Charanpur to serve the people and help build a better future, symbolically reconnecting with his identity and sense of purpose, returning to one’s homeland not just in geography, but in spirit - and choosing to be part of the change.

Both my husband and I had different, yet deeply connected reactions to watching Swades. My husband was born and raised in India, emigrating to the U.S. in his early 30s, and though he’s lived here for almost 25 years, he returns to India yearly to visit family, reconnect with old friends, and, of course, to eat everything he loves. I, on the other hand, as the eldest daughter of South Asian immigrant parents who came to the U.S. in the early '70s, have been suspended between the landscape of America and the memories my parents carried from India. I’ve visited nearly every year since birth, gathering pieces of my homeland through each return.

Watching the film, his reaction was for a life he lived, a place he knew. Mine was to a place I’ve never fully lived in, but that lives deeply in me. He ached for what he left behind; I ached for what has always been mine, but never fully mine. For him, the movie recalled the textures of a familiar past. For me, it awakened something ancestral, emotional. We were both seeking something enduring, something lost, something that connects us to who we were and are becoming.

In that moment, we sat, native and visitor, each carrying a different question about home. What will our children inherit from these places we hold so dear? Will they know what home means, not just in geography, but in essence? In spirit? We both find ourselves asking: Is this home? And realizing we ask it for entirely different reasons.

The moment of return

I started reflecting about the spaces and times when I feel at home. I immediately reminisce about how it feels to simply arrive in India. After a long flight, the plane lights turn on and the captain says “we are beginning our descent to Sardar Vallabhai Patel International Airport”. I quickly slide open the window to gaze at the land below. My heart is activated by what it remembers. As I step off the air-conditioned aircraft, I am immediately hit with the first whiff of what I call “the India smell” - a combination of heat, airports and slightly polluted air. An instant familiarity enters my soul the second I step onto that land. I know this place. And this place deeply knows me. And no matter how long I have been gone, India envelopes me into her arms and lets me weave my way in again. I am simply known.

Ask anyone in my family – including the next generation of children we have raised here – what it means to go to India and everyone catches a wistful look in their eye and a loss of adequate words to describe it. But the commonality in everyone’s expression will be that knowing. And the comfort of being known. Of love and being loved. It is where we learned Community is a Verb. It is where we see it lived without being spoken. As a way of life that has been passed down from generation to generation. And we find ways of expanding it to this day wherever we are.

What is home?

Because of this knowing, my least favorite question in the world is “Where are you from?” Or its cousin: “Where is home for you?” The answer has changed as I’ve grown older, more grounded, more unapologetically myself. But in every chapter of life, that question has felt like code for something else - “who are you, really”? And for a long time, I treated it like an invitation (or demand) to explain my whole identity.

As a child, I was made up of parts: immigrant kid parts, Midwestern parts, daughter-of-India parts. I mapped them out for people like a walking ancestry chart, just trying to be understood.

People would say things like:

• “Are you related to Pocahontas”?

• “You don’t sound Indian.”

• “Do you eat monkey brains?” (Thanks, Indiana Jones.)

• “Love your Indian princess costume!”

And I’d respond:

• “Not that kind of Indian, stupid. Columbus was too dumb to know where he landed”.

• “My parents are from India; I was born here.”

• “No, we’ve never eaten anyone’s brains. We are vegetarians”.

• “It’s what I wear to weddings. I like sequins”.

The Awkward Enlightenment Years

In my 20s and 30s, I wanted people to really get me. So I over-explained. I tried to educate. I wanted respect, not reduction. People meant well, but said things like:

• “Madonna wears bindis—so cool!”

• “Do you speak Indian?”

• “I love the elephant print at Urban Outfitters!”

• But where are you really from?

And I’d reply (more tired now, a little sharper):

• “Bindis have history. They’re not just accessories.”

• “India has 800+ languages. I speak Gujarati.”

• “That elephant is Ganesha. He’s sacred. Not merch.”

• “America” (just because I liked to be snarky about it)

Making home, again and again

What I didn’t have language for then was this: We had done the work of turning everywhere we lived into a home. Indiana, Michigan, the small towns, cities, rural and suburbs. Each one held our rituals: the bi-weekly blue aerogram letters to India, “daal, bhaat, shaak, rotli” dinners, TGIF family TV nights or summer road trips to visit family. We planted roots and cultivated community in every place we landed. And they bloomed into homes we grew to love.

In my earlier life, I considered my only home to be wherever my parents were. When my father passed away in 2011 and my mother came to live with me in D.C, she and I, along with my youngest sister who lived with me, created a different version of home in an urban space where we didn’t have family roots. It didn’t mean Michigan wasn’t home anymore. We added an offshoot, from which the tendrils of our family story took new twists and turns. When I got married and moved to New Jersey, D.C remained a cherished home and I created a new branch where we tended another hearth. It is the reason I know that when our elders pass away in India and no one lives in our ancestral homes, it will still remain the place where we all come from.

And now? I don’t feel the need to perform a history lesson every time someone asks me where I’m from. Because I know: I’m from many places. I belong to many homes. And more than anything, I’m shaped by the people who made those places home with me. The world has tried to become smaller, and in some ways, it has. But it’s also grown more divided. In the midst of all of that, I’ve learned to stay close to what grounds me. Today, I feel more rooted. More whole. And grateful that I have found home in one place. And a thousand places.

Dúchas: To Be of the Place

On a recent trip to Ireland, I learned that the Irish have a word for this: dúchas. There’s no perfect English translation, but it means something like the longing and belonging of a place. Not just born there—but shaped by its earth, its people, its rituals, its pain. Dúchas lives in the blood. It’s in the way you carry memory not just in your mind, but in your body. Both my husband and I experience this feeling in different ways for our homeland. His is the longing of departure. Mine, the belonging of return.

And yet, home is also the quiet of early mornings in New Jersey. It’s having cha and khaari with my daughter when she comes home (real cha, not the stuff that has been appropriated by coffee places in the U.S. Please note - there is no such thing as “chai tea”. Chai IS tea). It’s the shouts that I hear from my son playing video games in the basement. It's the home cooked meals my husband makes for us out of love. It’s my nieces and nephews, born here, laughing and talking in Gujarati and English with the elders in equal (or sometimes broken) fluency. It’s in the halls of community centers and high school gyms that transform into the spaces where we celebrate holidays like Navratri, Holi or Diwali. It’s the communities we’ve built and led, the rooms we’ve entered and helped change. The lives we’ve stitched together in the name of something more communal, more enduring.

It’s the story of so many of us who straddle borders - immigrants, children of immigrants, people tethered to more than one land. Home is both fixed and fleeting. Rooted and migratory. Sometimes it’s the literal place. Where your people live, where the air smells familiar, where your feet know their way from the kitchen to the mandir without a second thought. Other times, it’s a sudden rush in your chest when your father’s favorite song comes on and you remember him humming it while paying the bills on a Sunday morning. It’s the cadence of your first language, even when the grammar escapes you. It’s the village where my mother was born, the ancestral land where my name still carries weight and history. It’s the warm scent of the soil after monsoon, the chaos of marketplaces, the temple bells ringing in the distance. It’s the aunties that tell stories on the porch swings; the shouts of children playing cricket in the street; the place that greets me like an old friend, no matter how long I’ve been away.

The Contradictions of Homeland

And simultaneously, homeland is a complicated and complex notion—not just a romantic ideal, but a place threaded with contradictions. It is love and lineage, yes—but it is also history, and history is rarely clean. Homelands hold the sacred, and the violent. It holds memory, but also forgetting. There are homes we were forced to leave; displaced by colonizers, famine, borders drawn by foreign hands. And there are homes we built on land that was never ours to begin with. We must ask and honor: Who did we displace when we made our homes? What was erased so that our roots could grow?

Homeland is not immune to corruption, to coercion, to power. It is often shaped by who had the right to belong and who was made to feel foreign, even on their own land. Around the world, homes are being turned into rubble by war, greed, occupation, and environmental collapse. Families torn from the very soil that knew them. Languages, rituals, songs passed down for generations interrupted by displacement, exile, genocide.

Here, in America, the story of homeland is layered with loss. Black and brown communities have been uprooted, re-zoned, and pushed to the margins, block by block, decade after decade in the name of development, progress and profit. The violence of gentrification and the legacy of redlining are etched into the architecture of American cities.

So, home is where the fault lines can run deep - but it is also where love lives. And part of honoring home is being honest about all that it holds: the warmth, the rupture, the rebuilding, the reckoning.

And still, we endure. We adapt. We build again.

Coming Home to Ourselves

Right now, home is this very moment of rest and reflection, the soft in-between of what was and what will be next. Home is not just where I live, but what lives in me - my rituals, my memory, my heart. Because it isn’t only made of walls, doors, four corners and a roof.

And even when homes are stolen or destroyed, something survives. The stories. The songs. The soil under the fingernails. The knowing.

We become the home. We become the archive. The map. The altar.

And maybe that’s why I’ve come to understand that home is not just a place we return to, but a place we return from. Again and again. We leave it and carry it forward. Into every table we set. Every child we raise. Every future we dare to imagine.

“Home, like community, is a verb. It’s something we practice. It lives in the everyday acts of showing up.” In a world where so many are asking how to build connection and how to find home in uncertain times, I offer this reflection as a compass. Home is not just a noun. Like community, it is a verb. It is something we build, tend to, return to, and co-create with others. It lives in the choices we make every day. Who we feed, who we hold, who we show up for even when it’s inconvenient or they aren’t known to us.

I’ve been thinking that maybe the work of our lives isn’t to choose just one home, but to allow ourselves to be shaped by all of them. To know that we are made of every place we’ve touched and every place that has touched us in return. Watching Swades reminded me that even in stillness, I am in motion. That even in rest, there is a deeper kind of return unfolding. I may not be hopping on a train through the Indian countryside or building a hydroelectric system in a rural village. But I am building. I am tending. I am remembering.

For me, this season of pause is not a break from home. It’s a return to it. To the questions I haven’t had time to ask. To the parts of me that only rise to the surface when I stop running. To the quiet knowing that I am not just from a homeland. I am also a home for what came before me, and for what comes next.

Home is a constellation

Home, for many of us in the diaspora, is not a single pin on a map. It’s a constellation. A network of places, people, sensations, and memories. It is longing and belonging, all at once.

And if home is a constellation, then our ancestors mapped the stars. And we are the weavers. Carriers of story. Stewards of memory. Translators of culture across oceans and eras. My parents were weavers. Whether they knew it or not, every decision they made - what to pack in the suitcases that brought them here, which traditions to fight for, which silences to keep - was an act of cultural continuity. They stitched together the old world and the new with quiet courage and deep care.

Now it’s my turn. I weave India into stories, into my worldview, my leadership ethos, into what I pour into those around me, how I raise my kids, how I community. I speak in integrated languages that hold two continents. I try to challenge the injustices I inherited, even as I wrestle with my place within them. Weaving is messy. Sacred. Ongoing. Because we do not preserve culture at one point in time. We make it breathable. Adaptable. Alive.

Home is the soil of my ancestors, and the soil you’re planting for my descendants. It is not a destination; it is a devotion. And in this moment, I am devoted to remembering. To resting. To reweaving.

To those who are searching, aching, unrooted. To those holding many homes or none at all. May these words help us remember that home is not always found; it is often made. And we make it, again and again, in community, with love.

Because even here, even now -

I am home.