Homesick

Family Weekend here at Syracuse University has always fascinated me a little — parents and grandparents storm the campus, bringing along a menagerie of pets and family-friendly vans that will metamorphose into a tailgate camp. My peers are walking their dogs, exchanging jokes with their fathers and food with their mothers, all dressed in the same loud orange shades and the same happy smiles. Just the sheer cultural difference in the way families manifest here makes me forget for a moment that my family and the families of other students like me couldn't make a quick road trip here, watch a game and stay the weekend. It's not difficult to deal with that realization; international students made their decisions and naturally realize that these chances are not theirs to take all the time. Still, a promenade steeped with families can hit home, especially if you're walking down alone with one backpack and zero family. The one thing that makes sure home always catches up with me is the visceral slam of all its sounds, smells, and views: the occasional rude honk of a vehicle or the heat of rare sun rays beating down on my neck. And from a campus thousands of miles away from India, the possibilities of impromptu trips home are laughable. And it’s become very easy to switch off and switch on views of home at will, at the slightest sign of a call to or a departure from familiarity. Homesickness is a bit of a sensory experience — all five senses attuned to tiny changes in the world around me. Home is a unique, flavor-packed identity built over many years of smelling my mom's food and burst pipes; seeing temple spires, dusty grey skyscrapers, peeling paint in loud obnoxious shades; touching and tasting rotis, dosas, and puris and burrowing into thin cotton bedspreads in the humid nights. I had to tweak that identity when I came to an orange, snowy college, yet at any given moment, I can easily see lots of different colors inside my own head, sparring between the familiar and the different. That stands even truer on this orange, orange Family Weekend, but it's no alien feeling coming one weekend a year. Here's what that feels like: wafting smells of reheated Indian food in the microwave and the jarringly different smells of the clothes I bought from home. Snatches of choice Indian language swear words bounce off my ears in friendly waves, breaking through the more commonplace English refrains of obscenity. Cutting up bhindi to recreate my mother's quick subji as a new, foreign knife slices into my finger. At sunset, no jasmine flowers adorn women's hair or temple idols, but the tiny flowers next to the crunchy warmth of fall leaves come packing a different friendly punch. And this weekend, the family vans and the little kids throwing around footballs in orange jerseys reminded me once again what home looks, feels, and sounds like here — a formula just like mine, with bits of the old and bits of the new.