നാട്

മലയാളിയാണോ?
നാട്ടിലെവിടെയാ?

There are many Malayalis who cannot read this universally accepted, bond-forging exchange between two Keralites. It is a curiously clannish bond. One day, in my class in school, my (non-Malayali) friend and I placed a bet on a test of this bond. The question “Where are you from?” yields diverse answers in a class in UAE: “I’m from Pakistan”; “Bangladesh”; “I come from Sri Lanka”; and more commonly, “I am Indian”. My Malayali classmates, with few exceptions, replied “I am from Kerala”. My friend won, and I took one step away from the staunch belief that ‘The Malayali Identity’ was a brand created by the many (many many) social clubs, restaurants, TV channels and whatnot to play upon the nostalgia-distorted memories of first-generation expatriates. Perhaps there is more to it.

My notion of home, as a second-generation NRI, has always been troublesome. I have envied my parents their unquestionable certainty that there is a ‘നാട്’ to go back to. Dubai, for me, was always a place from where leaving was imminent – it never felt like home. Kerala, in turn, is that place I saw for two months a year.  I have been taught to call it home, but the irony of it has always struck me. My written Malayalam is formal and stilted, picked up from textbooks and the odd decades-old classic I read. My spoken Malayalam, like my നാട്, is an inheritance from my parents. I know enough about the films, little about the literature and nothing about the politics of Kerala. I think in English and crack jokes in Malayalam. I have possibly recited the UAE anthem more than the Indian one. Where does that leave me? Not in നാട്, surely. 

For those two months in Kerala, my parents radiate the confidence of those who know every nook and cranny; they walk as if they own every stone. For me, by the time a place takes on soothing familiarity, it is time to leave (as it will be here, in Chennai).  The response this evokes has mellowed from sadness to a vague puzzlement to some semblance of acceptance. I now have friends who have lived all their lives in Kerala, yet speak Hindi or English better. We switch to Malayalam for jokes. Always.

But the question remains: where is home? ‘Home is where the heart is’ seems rather trite and unhelpful. Yet there are glimpses of home in the ഓണസദ്യ we have in our flat, in the welcoming signboard ‘ഊണ് തയ്യാർ’ on some nondescript restaurants in a hot Arab city, in the rainy vacations – yes, even in ‘Brand Malayali’. For me, though, home is to be found in a pleasantry between two absolute strangers; one that gives no space for the troubling question ‘നാടെവിടെയാ?’ – ‘where is home?’ Home is to be found in

മലയാളിയാണോ?
നാട്ടിലെവിടെയാ?