A Fast Moving Consumable Gora

When I’m in India I listen to The Goon Show on my iPod. Back in England I watch old Amitabh Bachchan films late at night on Channel 4. In the past four years I’ve spent nearly half of them living and working in India, dividing my self between the crown and the jewel.

I’ve become a Fast Moving Consumable Gora. A single white male who exists in two cultures, collecting visa’s and exit stamps, trying to answer the internal question, where is my home?
Don’t get me wrong, I love England. It’s where I was born, where I grew up, where had my first fight and where I first fell in love. It’s my first home. My family live there and I speak the language with indigenous ease. But I miss India, and whenever I’m away from her I feel part of my heart stops, some vital artery becoming clogged by the absence of cows in a busy street.

The two main problems faced by any ‘traveller’ (and I use the expression with extreme caution) are food poisoning and homesickness. Both debilitating and messy, making your stomach ache for familiar comforts.

In India I’ve learnt to eat well, using fresh fruits, parotta, rice, dhal and dosas as the basis of my diet, but I suffer nostalgia at least once a month. It’s a yearning, born from the similarities between these two countries, which to me are as comparable as the differences.

I see reflections of England in India. I see it in newspaper copy and on TV debate shows. In the frenetic confusion at markets and funfairs, and in frustrated glass window of every reluctant train ticket counter. It’s in the buildings, in the politics, in the cities and in the cricket. It’s carved on the face of every tired working man smoking outside a Chai stall.

Then there’s the India I see in England, in the Diwali lanterns I made at nursery school. In the Hindi curses I learnt in playgrounds and in the Aloo Gobi I order in restaurants. In the Asian communities where I live, where I shop and where I am asked to vote for a Chowdhary, a Singh, or a Khan. India wasn’t new to me, it was under discovered, but I’ve always grown up with the taste of spice in my mouth.

So where do I go now? Back and forth, swapping 6month visas for shorthold tenancy agreements. I write this sitting in Kumily, a small hill town on the Kerela and Tamil Nadu boarder, and the birthplace of condiments I have packed up in a box marked ‘Kitchen’. Tomorrow I leave for Munnar, where Tetley Tea comes from, and then back to Kochi, the small but beautifully amalgamated trading port on India’s South West coast.

Everyday I miss England, but I’m still happy in a place where things make sense to me. And when it all gets too much, when the rubber stamped duality shouts at me from the pages of my passport, I think about the packed lunches my mum used to make me at primary school, full of onion bhajees and Kit Kats.