Going 'Home' to a Place Where You've Never Lived

Solita

Devika Parmar, a first-generation Gujarati American, embarks on a solo journey to India at age 32 to reclaim her relationship with her herit

Key takeaways

• Home is not just a physical place but a complex emotional and cultural connection that must be personally reclaimed.

Main topics

• Reclaiming cultural identity
• Solo travel and personal transformation

Notable quotes

"A place is just like a person, which is to say it's with the beauty and flaws and complexity and it's all part of it."

Conclusion

Devika's journey reveals that home is not a fixed location but an evolv

Transcript preview

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Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, Speaker 3 (1:02) this is Kylie Brakeman. Angela Geratana. Speaker 8 (1:04) Jeremy Colhane. Patrick McDonald. And Speaker 3 (1:06) we're the hosts of the Artists on Artists on Artists on Artists podcast. The Speaker 8 (1:09) improvised character comedy podcast where each week a new panel of artists discuss their craft. Join us for a panel of Eurovision participants. Speaker 1 (1:18) And we do a little Halloween sometimes. Does the Pope dress up? He winks on Halloween. He gets Speaker 8 (1:24) right up next to the microphone. Speaker 1 (1:26) I hear you can almost hear the eyelashes hit each other. Speaker 8 (1:29) You've never seen Italy so quiet as when the Pope gets up to wink on Halloween. Speaker 1 (1:34) Listen to Artists on Artists on Artists on Artists every Thursday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 3 (1:42) If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse. Each week, we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture with your favorite writers, book talk creators, and plenty of overthought opinions. Yeah, I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed. Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 2 (2:12) So like by age 11 or so, at least 70 % have a phone. Speaker 1 (2:16) I'm Dr. Joy, and this is Therapy for Black Girls. We spend our surviving middle school run getting into what's happening inside your kid's brain, their group chats, and their friendships, and what you can do about it. Speaker 8 (2:27) Your child is not doing this on purpose. Speaker 1 (2:29) That's the kind of perspective we've been pulling from the psychologists and psychiatrists who study this for a living. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 5 (2:41) There's a way that like a return to homeland story can feel very fantastical and glorified and eat pray lovey. And I think that there's a way that I'm trying to like hold the messiness of it. You know, Julie, I thought about leaving. I was like, I don't feel good here. And one of the women I met was like, you can leave or you can find your safety. You can stay and you can complete the cycle or you're going to leave and you're always going to associate with this place, the experience you had. Speaker 4 (3:08) Yeah. Speaker 5 (3:09) That's part of why I stayed. The thing that feels really important to invite into the conversation is just that like a place is just like a person, which is to say it's like with the beauty and flaws and complexity and it's all part of it. And if you jump, the net will appear. Speaker 4 (3:34) This is Solita, stories of what really happens when you travel alone. The beautiful, the messy, and the moments where you say yes and surprise yourself. I'm your host, Julie Pinheiro. Speaker 4 (3:53) A few years ago, I went to Puerto Rico alone. The archipelago is home to both sides of my family, my entire lineage. But I grew up in Maryland, and I'd never really gone back to the island as myself. I was always someone's hija, someone's nieta, being ferried around to different relatives. I had never connected with the people who also play guitar, or who also start their mornings with a swim. or even just with people my own age. On that trip, I found a lot of things that I really connected with. I also found an old man named Pepo who wouldn't leave me alone. My guest today, Devika Parmar, went to India alone at 32. She grew up in the Bay Area in a Gujarati-speaking household. India was always present. She just never got to have her own relationship with the place. So she booked three weeks alone to find out what was actually hers. And a brush with her own pebble almost cut her trip short. Devika, welcome to Solita. Thank you. Can you describe the relationship to your Indian heritage that you had growing up first gen in the U.S.? Speaker 5 (5:07) So I grew up here in the Bay Area, and I grew up in an intergenerational household with my paternal grandparents, my parents, and my brother. A lot of my access to culture came through my parents, but really through my grandparents because they didn't speak English. And so that's where me being fluent in Gujarati, which is the state we're from in India, Gujarat. My grandma to this day cooks all the food in that house where she lives with my parents. And so eating Gujarati food at home and then having rich kind of religious cultural experiences really mediated through my family. We went. As children, a few times, like I feel like in my childhood, we went every few years until a certain point. And that was kind of my main exposure to being in India as a child. And I remember things like the humidity and the smells. And it was a very sensorial kind of experience. And generally, my association was very nostalgic because I associate it with these trips that we took to go visit my maternal grandparents who lived in Mumbai for their whole lives. Because of the nature of my current work, which is in a school, I had this magical opportunity to have three weeks off. And I asked myself, if I could go anywhere for three weeks, where would I go? And I was kind of itching to go back to India. And I had asked, actually, one of my best friends, who's also Gujarati, I had asked him, like, hey, do you want to come? And I had asked my friend in New York, like, hey, do you want to come? And everybody was like, oh, yeah, let me see. And then it just ended. up that nobody was free. Speaker 2 (6:44) I Speaker 5 (6:44) was like, oh, well, I guess I'll still go. And six weeks before the trip was when I when Speaker 4 (6:51) I booked my flights. So you were excited. Was there anything that you were feeling nervous about? Speaker 5 (6:56) I was excited, but frankly, more than that, I was terrified and that I was like, what am I going to do going by myself to this place that I have a relationship that's really mediated through my parents? The predominant feeling was terror. And also, I have to do this. I think the other thing that feels really important around my decision to go back was that in the year-ish prior, both of my... my maternal grandparents who lived in Mumbai, they had passed away. And so that tether that I had to the place, that really direct tether was gone, at least in the way that I understood it to be. I definitely feel there's a way that that contributed to my desire to go back to say like, well, what now? Who am I as an adult in this place? Not the version of me that is a child that is staying. with my grandparents or other relatives and then being kind of put in a car and told, okay, we're going to go visit this relative and that relative is taking us from place to place to place or the opportunity to really see and understand my relationship to this place and what uniquely that is for me. Speaker 5 (8:17) I have three weeks, so I wanted to go to three places. The first one is Mumbai, which is the place where my parents were raised and the place I visited as a child. The second place was Ahmedabad in Gujarat, and that is to just be surrounded by Gujarati culture and language and food. In a way, I haven't. And then the third place, I'm not sure yet. I wanted... to decide when I was there, which, you know, anybody who's going to be listening to this who knows me, Speaker 4 (8:51) I Speaker 5 (8:52) think their jaw would drop a little bit. Yeah, like I am like neurotically organized, structured, planning. So when I say that leading up to this trip, I was feeling terror. It was also that I was kind of setting myself up for the ultimate edge. I was kind of in a search for what's freedom. It's not the absence of the fear, but it's choosing to see that there could be other ways. And I was like, I'm in a leap. And what I'm really practicing is to trust in the face of fear. Speaker 4 (9:23) And Speaker 5 (9:23) as we'll talk about today, within hours of me landing, I had all these magical things happen too. Speaker 4 (9:30) Let's talk about it. You're in the plane on the way to Mumbai. Yes. What are you feeling just before you land? Speaker 5 (9:36) I'm landing at three o'clock in the morning. And I was afraid of two things. I was afraid of safety and I was afraid of being lonely. And I think when I was flying in, I was just, I was excited, but I was also like, okay, I gotta, I gotta land and I gotta get a ride to this place and I gotta find this place. And I'm just, I have so many memories of walking through those double doors and just being hit with the humidity of this place and the heat or the smells. And so I'm anticipating that and I'm also. Speaker 5 (10:11) rehearsing the logistics that I need to execute on upon landing. Speaker 4 (10:14) Oh, God, I know that rehearsal. Maybe you don't have Wi-Fi, so you take screenshots of the Google map from the airport to the hostel or the Airbnb or whatever it is. God, I know that. Speaker 5 (10:25) Yeah. I landed at three. I rested a bit. And then I ended up meeting a friend of a friend for an early lunch who ended up being a really sweet friend throughout my trip. And we sit down to lunch and I'm saying like, I have this really important task, which is that I want to go to this beach where my grandparents' ashes were scattered. And this beach is kind of out of the way. Like, you know, I looked it up on the map and it said it would take two hours driving to get there. And this person that I meet is like, oh, great, I'll take you there. And I'm like, you had just met Speaker 4 (11:00) this person. Speaker 5 (11:01) Yes. And I'm not even halfway to my first day there. And he's like, yeah, I'll take you. So this like very key spiritual task that I had that I wanted to do this, like if there was anything that was the most important thing for me to do. In Mumbai, I wanted to honor the spirits of the tether that I described as not being there anymore. And I was like, great, I have a plan now of how to do this thing. This person that I met, we'll just call him T. When I needed things, he was somebody that I reached out to. What becomes very apparent is just that even though you're solo traveling, you're not really solo. You're solo and you're orchestrating solo. Speaker 5 (11:44) It's really all about the people that you meet along the way and the benevolence of new friends or strangers that makes something like going to a place I'm not that familiar with three weeks and being able to even do something like that. He picks me up in a car. I have prepared a bag full of flowers as an offering and we get on the road. We're listening to one of my favorite playlists of Indian music. And I listen to a lot of Indian music. And when I say Indian music, I mean like Bengali music, Gujarati music, Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi. So much of, once again, that experience for me of music is a cultural access point, right? And so much of that, once again, is really something that I do on my own in the place that I live. And we're in the car and... I mean, this guy knows the lyrics to all these songs that are coming on. And we're just in this car kind of connecting and singing along. And it is so beautiful. And Speaker 4 (12:52) what's it like when you get to the beach? Speaker 5 (12:53) It's quite a crowded beach. And I think both him and I were, we were really present to the experience, but we were goal oriented. I am here to honor my ancestors. I have brought my flowers. I have flown across the world. And he's really wonderful in that he's just like, go do what you need to do. So we walk farther down the beach where it's a little bit less busy. And my grandmother who passed, she was a really challenging woman. I felt that she was unkind, but I think ultimately she was wounded. And so the ritual that I wanted to do was really about like honoring what she might have gone through in her life. And so, yeah, this guy kind of gives me space and I'm, I walk into the water and I. Speaker 5 (13:46) I'm like naming a prayer and putting a flower down and I'm naming a prayer and I'm putting a flower down and I'm naming a prayer. And when it's done, I kind of take a step back. You just see that ocean water just covered in like