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Forgive me a bit if I appear a little lost in transition. It’s quite a leap from my 15 seconds in the limelight that accompanied the launch of my first book, (Delhi and Mumbai) to a quiet corner of Virginia, just spitting distance from the capitol of the USA. No, it’s not jet lag.

Nor is it even that discombobulated feeling when the body has reached its destination while the mind—indeed the spirit—is still making that journey across the seven seas. They do say that earlier forms of travel like trains and ocean liners allowed the mind to adapt itself to its new destination, shedding the old as if it were some old skin and bracing for a new.

Forgive me a bit more if I do get a little more personal this time. Coming to America is for me is going back in time, like, well, a journey to the past. A past that’s been put on a backburner whose fire went out so long ago that stoking it back to life will require the skills of a Merlin.

The almost ten of my what they call formative years here—in school in Washington D.C., and in college in New England—had gone by in a blur. Like many who have not quite read their Proust but do know about the ability of the little Madeleines (French cupcakes) to transport you to childhood on the wings of aroma, I began my remembrance of things past by reaching for the Reese peanut butter cups (chocolates filled with peanut butter).

But then something strange happened. The peanut butter cups tasted like besan ki barfi coated with chocolate. And then it all came back in a flash. The reason we first began to eat those wretched things was because they were the closest to besan ki barfi you could find here: in all those years here we were always trying to replicate or simulate the desi in an alien clime.

So it was with chaat, for which nachos or something similar would have to do the trick, and baba au rum for gulab jamuns— all this is much before the advent of MTR or any of those miraculous instant mixes and the mushrooming Indian grocery stores.

And so it was with life. We, and by this I mean diplomats and their families, lived in an imaginary India, our feet on American soil but our senses and spirit at home. Come to think of it, most American and several European diplomats and ex-pats do much the same in India today: they lead sequestered lives behind impermeable walls that keep out the sights and smells of quotidian Indian life. As do, increasingly, many Indians. But I am digressing. Indian cinema, especially its romantic, melancholy-tinged songs, was the umbilical chord to our imaginary India, as was food from the home country.

Second generation British South Asians—or even second generation Indians in the United States—might today lead schizophrenic lives, taking off the masks they wear to school or to work when they come home to families caught in a time warp. But back then in the late 60s we still set, metaphorically speaking, our watches to Indian time.

To us privileged diplomatic babas and babies the Indians who had come to this country to stay were really not PLUs. They went to different schools, spoke differently, and saw the future differently from us: there was an East-East divide going on here. While we hankered for home, they had turned their back on it in pursuit of a future with more dignity. The NRI meant something totally different then.

Today the wheel has turned with the diplomatic brethren looking a touch more shabby and out of context than the NRIs who are increasingly fitting in. Gone, too, is that awkward transitional stage of FOB’s (fresh off the boat) and ABCDs (American Born Confused Desi): they have dropped the C, and an exponentially increasing number are born here. Just like the Irish, Italians and European Jews before them they are comfortable with their hyphenated state.

And that business about searching for roots is no big deal: they can have their cake and eat it too: you don’t need to go to India to have the India of your choice in your midst. From bhel puri, paan and the latest Bollywood film to, yes, a few drops of the Ganga in a local river, you can have it all.

And some have even turned full circle-heading home. Some to better their lives, and a trickle to help those more unfortunate than them. Of course, you did have Shah Rukh Khan playing the Good Samaritan in the film Swades. In fact, Suri Krishnamma, an NRI is currently shooting a film called Good Sharma: a New York lawyer-turned-cabbie returns home when his mother is critically ill and then starts a school in a village for girls. As for those peanut butter cups, for these people, they are plain peanut butter cups, without aftertaste, or foretaste.

Email: jain_madhu@hotmail.com