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“I will try and create first-world bubbles in Mumbai…”
I fervently tell myself, my husband, my neighbours, my PTA buddies at the American School of Dubai – and frankly, to anyone who will listen. When we realised we were going to have to move to Mumbai early last year, around March 2015, because of a new career opportunity for my husband, I was heartbroken. In the cracks, crept in an incomprehensible despair that I could not fully acknowledge even to my family as I chose to cheerily chant the “Every move is an adventure” mantra to prop up their spirits. Maybe I was repeating the mantra more to convince myself because I knew exactly what we were in for.

 

You see, 14 years ago, we had eagerly boarded the NRI train, which whizzed us away from India –our birthplace and home of 27 years – to hyper international places like Makati in the Philippines, super-efficient Singapore, and dazzling Dubai.
It was so easy to “upgrade” to these environments where safety, hygiene and order were a priority for the governments there. Even in the Philippines, we stayed in the glass-and-concrete bubble called Makati and viewed life through our skyscraper windows in a building we shared with Imelda Marcos, her shoes and a swanky rooftop helipad.

 

We were insulated from the immense and intense India-like poverty that fringed Manila. We considered ourselves lucky to have “escaped” India and gone to the Philippines for our first expat posting. We survived a military coup there, became parents, and after two years we relocated to Singapore.

 

A Singaporean cabinet minister is rumoured to have once said “All Indians should consider Singapore their eastern-most city.” How true that was for us – there were ample stores selling Indian groceries in this modern city-state, dosa and samosas were available in most food courts, and beautifully carved Hindu temples in Little India welcomed worshippers and visitors with Indonesian incense, Burmese palm sugar “prasad” and China-made brass bells.

 

All this, alongside pristine sidewalks, cultivated greenery, orderly traffic, prompt public services and seamless banking transactions (no multiple, self-attested forms). In Singapore, there was peace and order even in a crowd, or rather, especially in a crowd. It was a city where my daughter learnt to walk, talk and stalk birds in the lush Botanical Gardens. It is where I resumed my career in publishing and my husband thrived in his job.

 

Another career move saw us to relocating to Dubai, where I opted for a more laidback life in an expansive villa, choosing to give my time to my husband and daughter. Both of them faced the same challenges in Dubai - new projects, new peers and new pressures. Helping them through their transition was my “home work” in the first few months before life took on a regular rhythm once again in an increasingly efficient city.

 

A forward-looking, people-oriented government headed by Dubai’s Sheikh Mohammed (affectionately called “Sheikh Mo”) ensured almost all paperwork was moved online or executed via efficient apps. We were just gearing up for another lovely Dubai winter when the Mumbai offer came through.

 

Maybe I was despairing because we would finally be getting off the NRI train, out of the bubbles we had encased our lives in with every expat assignment. A friend told me over lunch at her golf villa one sunny afternoon in Dubai, “People keep criticising Dubai and Singapore by calling these places Disney-landish bubbles. But tell me one thing, if people get a pass to stay in Disneyland for life, why would they ever want to leave?” I remember agreeing with her as we nibbled our mini falafels and sipped Turkish coffee.

 

While my former bubbles had burst, I did not fully analyse why I was so anxious to create similar ones for my family in Mumbai. Maybe I wanted to protect my NRI daughter from the rough and tumble of the Indian environment which we had experienced as children; and which my US-born and bred nephew was experiencing as he had also relocated from Wisconsin to Mumbai a few months before us.

 

He, a bright, polite 8-year-old, was attending a new International school in the suburbs where the majority of students were Indians. His first questions on the phone to his dad (my brother) still working in the US were, “Dad, a boy in my class drank from my water bottle with his mouth. What should I do?” or “Dad, some boys threw stones at me when I was in the garden…” or “Dad, some boys pulled my shorts down in PE class… who do I complain to?” If his school’s environment was so radically different from the protected, politically-correct, “personal-space-respecting” and “no-sharing-food-or-nuts” American pre-school, how would he adjust to his new reality?

 

I had the same apprehensions for my daughter who had never lived in India for more than a fortnight on our annual visits home. I knew my husband and I could wing it in India where we knew the language and ethos. But returning with a tween who had never lived here was another thing.

 

Small innocuous things tripped us up in the early. We took our daughter to see the latest Hindi Bollywood potboiler at a nearby mall one day. She asked me, “Mum, will the movie have subtitles?” I looked at my husband tongue-tied. We were so used to watching Hindi movies with subtitles abroad that it never crossed our minds that movies here were screened without subtitles. She sat through the movie grumbling and I did a rushed, whispered translation of long dialogues all through. We planned to hire a house helper but realised many young girls we interviewed could not speak English. How would she and my daughter communicate?

 

I had often heard the “bragplaint” that expatriate children grow up in a bubble where they are shielded from the trials and tribulations of “reality” – only I could see the irony of me trying to perpetuate this bubble in a country which would prick it in every way, a country which teaches one resilience before real life even begins.

Even our living environments changed drastically from what we were used to… Our home, during our first four months in Mumbai, was a 5-star service apartment close to the American School of Bombay, which my daughter attended. I loved sitting at the desk in my little, orderly, quiet cocoon of a living room, which was in front of a glass wall that overlooked lush trees barely camouflaging the urban sprawl behind them – it seemed like nothing had changed in a decade.

 

Weather-beaten buildings, bright blue tarpaulin covering the roofs of a nearby slum, ubiquitous white dish antennas sprouting like metal mushrooms on rooftops, a construction crane silhouetted like a headless, one-armed scarecrow against the skyline, dusty, rusty iron scaffolding of some half-finished building... Some buildings we looked at had rental units with blinding white walls and yellowing conditioner units that belonged to the 1980s. They looked like a couple of decaying teeth in an otherwise dazzling set. I used to wistfully gaze at numerous Singapore Airlines jets taking off in front of me daily from the airport nearby, their yellow and blue logos almost mocking our decision to relocate to India and giving me the hope, or maybe the illusion, that escape was a flight away.

The physical inconveniences of Mumbai needed getting used to all over again, that was a given. However, I felt we needed to get used to another sort of adjustment - being anonymous in one’s own country. When living abroad, our identities as Indians came with their own set of experiences - mostly good, sometimes mildly discomfiting, but never indifferent.

In the Philippines, we were mistaken to be "moneylenders" (called "Five-Six") because back in 2002, many Indians who had settled in Manila were moneylenders. In Singapore, around 2004, it was largely assumed that we were IT professionals - any other industry with a predominance of Indians did not even figure strongly back then.

In many ways, we were the stereotype that every other Indian abroad was. In Brazil (we lived there for a brief while), we were the exotic Indian family with intriguing eyeliner and Indian bling. In China, we were the much-photographed Indians with "big eyes". Our faces are probably stored in assorted flash drives of some cameras in Beijing even now

A friend who had relocated from Singapore to New Delhi and back to Singapore six years ago had told us once, "The biggest change one feels when coming back to India is that you look no different from anyone else around you." That seemed like a throwaway observation back then when we were still marked out in Singapore by our  “Indians from India” identity.

 

Today, we look no different from any other Indian, and no one looks at us differently. This takes some getting used to as an NRI. In Mumbai, you could be anyone - and unless you mark your forehead with an NRI tattoo, you will be treated no differently from any other Indian out there. There is little curiosity about where you belong to as one blends in so smoothly, so anonymously.

I may hanker to feel different, to feel like a well-heeled expatriate or an NRI, but unless I announce it, no one cares or is bothered about my "NRI-ness". In a strange way, I am identity-less, no different from another Indian on the roads, in the hotels or airports, cafes and condos. Maybe it is liberating after a while, but to be honest, sometimes I do miss the distinction of being marked out as an NRI.

Whenever we visited India on our annual visits, we lubricated over the myriad inconveniences with our foreign currencies that always came out stronger against the rupee. Today, we have to try to do the same while living here. We can flash the cash to get some sort of special attention or service, but Mumbai, being the great leveler that it is, you are still struggling on the same roads and same potholes.

 

Every move changes a family in various ways regardless of the family’s nationality. Today, six months down, I have managed to create some fragile bubbles, far from first-world ones, for my family – but curiously, I find myself wanting to prick it every so frequently to let some parts of Mumbai in. That way I can immerse myself in the iriscendent hues of life here, allow the colours of the city to present themselves to me like a Rubik Cube which is too complex for me to solve, but one where every twist presents a new perspective.

 

I have walked through a dark, dirty slum here only to find a tailor who creates embroidered magic in his workshop that far surpasses any couture I have seen in Dubai or Singapore; I have throbbed with indescribable energy watching the spirited traditional Maharashtrian Lavani dance performance by the support staff at the American School of Bombay, I have had coffee with a beautiful French friend who finds the city amazing, in a non-patronising way, and accepts it warts, noise, chaos and all. I know how grateful my driver feels to have a room to house his family here, and how my young helper was bold to move out of a dowry-demanding marriage.

 

My daughter accepts blackouts in five-star resorts, queues at mall toilets, blaring music from a nearby school function at all hours of the day, and hustles her way through crowded places matter-of-factly. Her resilience has come shining through at home, and in school. My husband loves the challenge of growing a business in India, delays, government red tape and manpower challenges notwithstanding.

 

This relocation to Mumbai took us completely out of our international, well-curated and orderly comfort zones, and the road till now has been a little rocky, but nothing like the avalanche of stress and frustration I was anticipating. Maybe we are “downgrading” our expectations here so we are not completely miserable here. Or maybe, just maybe, we are “upgrading” our expectations of ourselves by embracing every new opportunity or old challenge, and manifesting the phrase that yes, “Every move is an adventure!”