Lately, my feelings have been calling out to me in my native tongue. Every thought had, word spoken, or lyric heard in Bangla swiftly translates to the feeling of wanting to “return home”, a habit I have not been able to let go of since childhood. I was four years old, the first time I returned from Bangladesh to Australia, and refused to speak a word of English, my first language. In fact, I had become so accustomed to my short, yet wonderful, life in a far-off land that I had called my father ‘Mama’, the Bengali word for Uncle, for months before returning to ‘Dad’. That was the first time I had left Bangladesh behind, not quite realising that the feeling of loss I was experiencing was, in fact, homesickness, for a place I wasn’t born to, for a language I have now lost fluency in, and a family I could not grow up with.
Since then, I have travelled between my two ‘homes’ four times. Since then, I have accumulated two lists: (1) the things I bring back to Australia with me, packed somewhere between my souvenirs and the soft spot in my heart, and (2) the things I leave behind. Through these lists, I try to understand if you can belong to a place, and its people, while living miles away.
List one always starts with the songs that defined that trip. The memory of sitting amongst at least three generations of my family, all of us singing the same song and harmonising our laughter as we lean against each other is embedded within this ever-growing playlist, so much so that I can barely bring myself to listen to the songs once I am in Australia, feeling displaced and alone as I listen to them on the train. There are the little bits of culture I pack away into my carry-on: the bangles and the jhumkas, my Mami’s homemade achar, a pocket-sized flag. There is the language, which I say each time I will hold onto, but then Bangla turns to Banglish turns to English, and I find myself stuttering over my rolled ‘r’s once more. Everything that falls under list one always has a footnote attached to it, reminding me that I cannot pack an entire ‘home’ into a suitcase and bring it back with me.
List two is much longer. It holds more gravity. It pulls me to the floor, weighted by the yearning for things that may never have been mine to begin with. When you leave Sydney airport after that 14 hour flight and you are sitting in the car on familiar roads, the first thing you notice is the sound of absolutely nothing. It’s a great loss, the ringing of rickshaws, the shouting and swearing of men across the streets, the way you can hear life in every moment. In its absence, loneliness makes convenient company.
You leave behind the trivial things, the things you take for granted, like wearing a salwar kameez every day, or rickshaws, or hearing Bangla everywhere you go. When you return to Australia, you wonder why you bought that orna if you have nothing to wear it with, and you take your headphones out on the bus just to listen to the man behind you speak in Bangla about car insurance to his wife.
Then, there is the matter of family.
Each time I return to Bangladesh, a secondary list is made to list number two — all the changes that I had missed by simply being 7171km too far away to experience or witness them. It is a list that primarily consists of family, and places me on the outside of their world, looking in and trying to find where I fit. My cousins, they have grown taller, they have married, they no longer play, they fall asleep by midnight. They share memories that I do not. They have grown up without me, together. When you live across the ocean, you are bound to miss a few things, or everything. My Mamas, who love me the same as they did when I was four, and my Mamis, who always show me an unfamiliar softness as they pleat my saree or plait my hair; the love is still there, and it is the most special kind of love, but they did not watch me grow. When you live across the ocean, the people who love you are bound to miss a few things. My Nano has aged, and the years in between are time wasted that should have been spent by her side, listening to her stories, getting told off every time I did not eat enough.
Yet, regardless of all the shapes I feel I must bend and twist myself into to fit into the lives of these people I return to, I can’t help but feel most at home in their presence. If I do not belong to the people I left behind, then who do I belong to?
On their soil, my bare feet against the cold, soft dirt of my Nana’r Bari, is home for me.
