An NRI's juggle between family, friends and festivities

December is when most NRI students return for a holiday. But it’s also the busiest month of the year for social events, and during the short trip home, juggling friends and family can be much more hectic than the holiday you had planned, ‘returnees’ tell Nivriti Butalia

Red-eyed Sudhir Sreenivasa, 29, lands in New Delhi on an Emirates flight at 3am on a Sunday in December. After the 19-hour flight, he is received by two parties. In one car, as a surprise, are his father and brother. In the other, also as a surprise (and playing the fool with garlands and drums) are two of his school friends.

Neither party knew of the other’s airport pick-up plans. There’s an awkward joviality. Sreenivasa’s earlier plan was simply to take a cab home. He, of course, chooses to ride with family. Friends and garlands follow in the second car.

Pranav Mahapatra, 27, who “slept like a dog” on his flight from London to New Delhi, arrives one day after Sreenivasa, at a relatively sane 11am. There’s no one to receive him, the doctorate student, at the airport. Still inflight, he inserts his local sim, and starts calling friends to make plans — but for “later in the day”, for he “better have lunch at home”.

For returnees to the hearth, December is a tightrope walk. A game of roulette. A juggling act. A season of planning, prioritising, reprioritising, scheduling and rescheduling. Of placing bets on friends and — with rare luck — cancelling on relatives. Of making excuses to one party, while guiltily dining with another. The phenomenon is so universal, social scientists may well be on the verge of  formally christening it.

For good reason then, when it comes to even formal social gatherings, this is the busiest month. Arvind Malhotra, former secretary of the St Stephen’s college Alumni Association agrees: “December is the best time to have a reunion.” His own batch of 1980 is scheduled to meet on Dec 23. The official college alumni meet took place, like every year, on the second Sunday of December.

In India for her best friend’s wedding, Riddhi Shah, 28, a Bombay-Gujju, and associate editor with The Huffington Post is married to finance guy Siddharth Bhargava. Riddhi has internalised management skills. Still, she says, “It’s a major pain when I’m here because my mother inevitably wants me to meet a whole bunch of family and for some reason she imagines that it’s of utmost importance for me to meet the cousin who had the baby or the aunt who wanted to invite me to dinner. On the other hand, my friends are very demanding and always want to go out, and then Sid throws a tantrum because my friends/family are monopolising all our time at the expense of his friends.”

That’s not all. Take a look at Riddhi’s itinerary: “I could only get two weeks off so I’m running around for my best friend’s wedding, after which my sister will be here, and then I’m going to fly in and out of Bombay to be with my in-laws for two days, take a train to Ahmedabad that evening for an event my dad is organising, spend a day there and take a night flight to Delhi and then fly back to NY.”

Her one understated comment: “Whew.”

Ask Riddhi about coping strategies and honesty stares you in the face: “I fight with my mom, I fight with Sid, I fight with my friends.”
Largely comic at one level, this yet-unnamed phenomenon, if not managed with the care you give a 3-day-old pup, can corrode nerves, hamper holidays and make you consider scaling barefoot the Chimgan Mountains in Uzbekistan over visiting home next year.

There’s something to be said for solidarity though. Each returnee knows what a fellow returnee is on about. There’s like an underground movement of NRI empathisers. Remember jetlagged banker Sreenivasa? In his two-week vacation, he has to make two trips to the south and east of the country to see both sets of grandparents. Ask silly questions such as “Hectic?” and you get defeated answers such as “Don’t ask”. It’s not that one doesn’t want to see branches and twigs and other offshoots of the family. Well, that too, but more than anything, one wishes time weren’t at such a premium.

Anandita Shukla, 31, consultant who, dumbing down her work description for the benefit of feature-writing friends, says she “does to companies what doctors do to people - i.e. heal them” apparently. Shukla has, after years of living away and flying back and forth from the US, mastered the growing pains felt by returnees. Her two usual requests to her parents who live in Agra: “keep patli patli chappatis and bhindi ready” — in ginormous quantities; and “don’t expect me to spend all my time with you in Agra”. “Weekends,” she tells them, “when my friends are free, will be in Delhi”. No questions asked. Agreements have been reached and deals struck in the name of maturity.

Anandita’s mother, Krishna Shukla, isn’t an unreasonable woman. But her worry has a different, part-legitimate dimension: “I don’t mind her meeting her friends. She must! But if Nandi spends all her weekends with her friends, when will we take her to meet boys we’ve lined up for her? As it is, she’s only here for 3 weeks.”

Mahapatra, he who has to have that one meal a day at home, has little patience for mollycoddling mothers and friends who get upset that you didn’t meet them this trip. “Frankly”, he says, “there are only so many people I can meet for two hours at a stretch.” (Anandita’s solutions are cheeky but simple: “Give different arrival/leaving dates to people so expectations aren’t high. Fib to people in general and DON’T bother meeting people you don’t really want to. It’s a holiday, enjoy yourself!”)

Bottom line: The returnee has to make the effort. Some amount of planning never hurt anyone. But don’t expect everyone to drop what they’re doing and throw you a homecoming party as if you were some local chieftain returning from slaying big scary creatures. That doesn’t work either.