On a Wednesday morning, I found myself on a Zoom call with a buyer for work. As time ticked on, we reached the inevitable no-man’s land, the gulf that calls for polite social conversation before hitting “end call.” I steadied myself for a few minutes of chit-chat, which opened with—
“So, where’s home for you?”
From their expectant expression, the other party was clearly waiting on a quick answer. I garbled out the name of the city I currently lived in before the amiable atmosphere could congeal. But even after mercifully pressing “End call,” I stewed in the sudden silence. For someone like me, that ice-breaker question is loaded. And it’s very rare that I give anyone my real answer: Home is everywhere and nowhere at once.
I was three months old when I was taken to Nigeria. Through the seasons— head-baking summer heat; Harmattan months that wove cracks into my skin like it was arid land; torrential rains that caused muddy water to flow from slopes like a giant pot of tea, upturned— I grew. I lived close to life, each moment more intense than the last. I was Nigerian, and I was not. Despite chattering in Hausa with the man selling MTN recharge cards, exclaiming “Nawa oh!” whenever I was disappointed, and wielding Pidgin English like an extension of my arm, at the end of the day, I came back to a home that spoke fluent Kannada and BBC English.
There are thousands like me: Army brats, expatriate children, children of diplomats and oil and gas workers who spent their formative years in a culture other than the one associated with their nationality or parents’ heritage. Social scientists have a name for us: Third-Culture Kids. We inhabit a unique culture of our own: an alien third culture spawned to spackle the gaps between the ones that wouldn’t fit us.
A month after my tenth birthday, we moved to India. I shuttled between Dubai and Bangalore — six months at dad’s, six months at mom’s until the months ran into years. At 21, I moved to England to study, forgoing a life in glitzy London for the more down-to-earth Sheffield. At 24, I moved back to Bangalore. Today, at 26, I don’t know who I am.
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Every year until I turned 10, we spent a month in India, touching base and reinforcing our relations. Ironically, we flitted even there, from one relative’s house to another’s. Between the hours spent stuffing my face with kodubale and chasing stray dogs down the street, I’d agree to sit down and answer aunties, each as different as they come but asking the same opening question: “Which do you like better: India or Nigeria?” When I was younger, I’d tell the simple truth: I like Nigeria. My friends are there. The cartoons are fun. I miss the taste of ananas after a long day at school. As I grew older, I said what they wanted to hear, what would safely get me out of the conversation without ruffled feathers: India. By the age of 8, I was seasoned in diplomacy. It’s a tool of the trade.
Third-culture kids stitch together facets of a fractured self-identity to present a kintsugi-like visage to the outside world. The gold used to line the cracks is code-switching: adjusting behavior, speech, appearance, language, even expression to optimise our and others’ comfort. To shed light on similarities while masking differences. To say, “look, I’m just like you. Please treat me fairly.” In doing so, we develop a rare ability to deal with situations with increased awareness, empathy and tact. After all, we’ve learnt the hard way that it pays to be a careful observer and a smooth talker — in security, success, or a few moments of peace.
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Spaces that are most familiar to me are the ones others consider transient. Airports, taxis, waiting rooms, rest stops: places we enter with the sole purpose of leaving are places I feel most at ease in. Textbook blandness and cookie-cutter architectural designs fast became the rare fixed points in my crisscrossed history. Associations were flipped on their head. Where others would walk into a perfume store and say, “Smells like perfume,” I would say, “Smells like duty-free.” As others would wait in unveiled impatience for their bags to arrive, I would take secret delight in matching bag to owner: This red wheelie belongs to the lady in the matching horn-rimmed glasses. This worn backpack has to belong to that guitar-carrying person. I thought this duffel belonged to that buff guy, but it belonged to this petite girl. As a child, I invented this game to keep myself busy. As an adult, I play this game to keep my eyes open to the multitudes these liminal spaces contain.
The memory of Amsterdam airport in particular—our most-frequented layover spot—is almost tangible. I see four-year-old me drumming my heels against the lobby chair; five-year-old me watching our bags while my pregnant mother finds a bathroom; ten-year-old me chattering away, blissfully unaware of how well and truly I had been uprooted. Here, in these spaces between places, there was refuge.
In the school I joined in India, everybody lived close by, and there was no mercy for transplants. No transition support for a child who had been grafted into a new culture like a cactus in the middle of the ocean. My face grew hot when I was made to stand outside after entering the classroom without permission. My accent grew wilder when I realized that one: I had an accent, a cross-breed of Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa inflections that gambolled from octave to octave in the span of a single sentence. And two: it was a far cry from the rolled-Rs-and-dropped-Ts American accent my classmates would have accepted as cool. I was not cool. But I was being reforged. I surrendered my passport. I gave up my identity. In both cases, I was minted a new one.
*
Today, my Facebook messenger folder is a study in third-culture kids trying to piece together their identity in retrospect. To open these messages is to see how third-culture kids deal with being rootless but free: by either flitting from place to place, forever nomads, or planting roots firmly in one city, like a stubborn tree, never moving. The casual comments—“remember me?”, “I was your classmate in school”, and “we met at that Indian Cultural Association party”—belie the urgency in stitching together episodes of our lives into a semi-cohesive whole. They mirror how we mythicise that which we have left behind, almost always for good. They edify a lingering sense we carry with us even as we laugh with our new friends, make new memories, and create new homes: an irrevocable sense of loss.
If anything, shuffling between countries and homes has taught third-culture kids to root identity not in places, but in people. We leave pieces of ourselves with people from our past, like a nostalgic Horcrux that houses reminders of who we once were. If we ever meet them, we ask, “Do you remember how I taught the carpenter and the plumber English using our front gate as a blackboard?”
“Was I really a great babysitter?”
“Did I really dance confidently on stage every single year?”
“Was I really all that?”
We hunger after their memories and unearth the person we used to be in what seems like another lifetime. Like a sedimentary rock that houses a precious fossil, we are layers upon layers of fabrications. We are mangroves, complex and enigmatic, with roots that exist but never really stay in the ground.
We don’t just make Horcruxes out of people we know. Driven by our desire to explain what it’s like to be between cultures, we make them out of others like us in the media, in art, in places of power, however sparse. We recognise a part of ourselves in Barack Obama, who spent boyhood in a multiracial paradise but threw his hat in America’s ring when the time came to choose. We delight in learning Freddie Mercury was born in Zanzibar to Indian Parsi parents and came of age in glitzy Bombay. We relate to everyone but to no one, and in this limbo, we forge fresh understandings of what it means to be a rootless third-culture kid.
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“So, where’s home for you?” Home is my family. Home is my collection of books. Home is a memory. Home is a myth. Home is everywhere and nowhere at once.