On growing up in random places

I was born in India. Between the ages of 3 and 10, I lived in Saudi Arabia and continued to visit once a year for the next 3 years. At 14, I left India for Singapore on a high school scholarship. I've lived there since then.

Within India, my family is from Mangalore but stays in Bangalore, having spent a few years in Mumbai and a year in Chennai.

I've been asked about this before, especially by people who've only ever lived their lives in one or two places, and that gave me a chance to reflect. I'd reflected a lot about this back in high school. The reflections are a faded memory. But I was asked a few times recently, making me revisit the lessons using the hopefully mature lens of adulthood.

The places I’ve been in are not as numerous or distinct as what a trailing child of a member of the military or a bureaucrat in a Foreign Ministry might have experienced. Yet, people find my background interesting enough that I’ve decided to express in writing what I generally convey in speech. They wonder if my being in so many places and being exposed to different cultures has had any enduring impact on me.

It's a resounding yes.

I’ve found the impact of this exposure, of the upbringing and of decisions that were not always mine to make, to express itself in both the big things and in smaller moments.

I sense it in my inexplicable affinity to SF’s Sunset neighbourhood, not so much because of its proximity to Ocean Beach but because of the reassurance of a Chinese bakery where I can get red bean pastry or peanut sauce noodles, my comfort food of choice when I worked in Singapore. At this point, I’ve probably cooked with bok choy more than Indian spinach. Or, when I overpay for zaatar bread at the Yemeni cafes because it reminds me of childhood weekends in Khobar when we’d go to a bakery to buy freshly baked, warm zaatar kabooz.

These choices have less to do with palate or taste and everything to do with memory.

Beyond the superficial interestingness of me at parties, my background has had a profound impact, good and bad.

The good

• I intuited the difference between reality and perception, and between truth and interpretation, earlier than most high schoolers. I had to contend with Indians’ idea of India, reconcile it with my own experience as an Indian, as Indian diaspora and as an Indian in the diaspora in different stages of my life.
• Appreciation for cultural differences: I contended with people’s ideas about the Middle East, Singapore and broader Southeast Asia, and experienced firsthand how I had more in common than not with Vietnamese and Indonesian friends.
• I learnt to trust my judgment and understanding, even if it was different from others’, precisely because my understanding was informed by my experiences & exposure more than books and textbooks. In general, I think it made me an independent and creative thinker.

The bad

• I don’t have enduring, life-long friendships. I exchange Instagram messages with friends from my childhood days in Saudi, but we couldn’t preserve the same connection as before.
• I have collected skills because of my environment. Because I left the environment, I had no reason to pursue completion or excellence. I am left with skills like being able to read Arabic script without understanding it. It’s a pointless skill that at the most earns me a memorable moment at parties.

The neutral

• I went through a contemporary and post-colonial fiction phase in high school where I’d guzzle books that dealt with immigration, identity and choice. Learnt a ton about the human experience. Wish I’d balanced it with science fiction that inspires us to push the frontier of human experience.