Opinion

So, your mom tells me you're moving" Tommy's voice crackled over the staticky connection from Canada to Chicago. I hadn't spoken to Tommy, my grandma's brother's son, in over a decade, but having spent a number of years stationed in India while serving in the US Army back in the 80's, he felt it necessary to put in his two cents. "India...That place is awful, especially Bombay. It was like hell on Earth, all chaos and people.Where are you staying again?"

"Bombay," I answered.

There was an awkward pause. "Maybe it's gotten better since
the last time I was there," he said, then changing tone in almost the same breath, "Why in god's name do you want to go to India, girl?"

"Why India?" It was the question on everybody's lips before I left, to which my
answer was always, "Why not?" I couldn't find the words to explain my logic (after all, who in their right mind would leave the clean, suburban sanity of timeliness and traffic regulations, to come to a place where a wandering cow is just as likely to stop a rickshaw as a red light?), but I figured that in India I would be surrounded by a group of like-minded expats who understood the unexplainable answer to that question. Turns out I was wrong.

"Why India?" followed me halfway around the world, and was often preceded with the even more disconcerting question "Wait, you actually wanted to move here?"

Most expats in India are like Tommy, here on account of their job and begrudging every minute. They live in the Expat Bubble, almost afraid to leave the comforts of air-conditioning and English. I recently talked to a guy who went on a three month paid leave from work. He could have done anything he wanted, but instead he holed up in his marble apartment, working his way through the Die Hard series, and ordering Domino's pizza every night.

The first time I went to a house party with the group of expats who would later become my friends, Liz, my childhood friend who moved here nine months prior, told me, "We are going to Lotia tonight."

Unbeknownst to me, it was customary for this particular group of expats to refer to their apartments by the building's name and not by the names of people who lived inside.Mistakenly thinking she was referring to some posh club, like Zenzi Mills or Aurus where we'd gone the weekend before, I asked if they served food.

Lotia was an apartment block like any other, but it was also strangely like a club, an exclusive foreigners' only club to which I hold a membership card because of my accent, my skin colour, and not because I necessarily belong. While other members live in nice apartments, Liz and

I live in a crappy, 1BHK that we share with two Indian men and a thousand cockroaches. Instead of calling it after the building's name, we call it after the prison, Arthur Road.

While other members can afford to drink at expensive bars, Liz and I subsist on Indian salaries, and can afford to drink only if we sneak the alcohol in ourselves. While other members moved to India because they were told, Liz and I came to India despite what we were told.

That is what really sets us apart. We came here on purpose. We came here to step outside of ourselves. But things that inherently link us to the expat club, bar us from gaining full access to the local scene. For one thing, I couldn't look more out of place, slouching down the street with my short hair and dirty jeans, amid the dignified women in their eye-popping saris. And let's just say that the local cuisine doesn't agree with me...

So, while I frequently take refuge at places like the Bagel Shop, the quintessential expat oasis, I prefer to sit outside with the buzz of local traffic in one ear, and the din of an air-conditioner in the other, the dividing line where the first and third world meet, in the limbo to which I belong.