Finally a native

The prolific writer Wendell Berry has an essay called The Native Hill — written shortly after he moved back to Kentucky to farm. It is about how landscapes and the humans in them shape each other, and how being fully alive in a place requires knowing it, accepting its history, and feeling responsible for it.

I read it this morning and it made me think.

I have spent four decades living in three different Indian states. For much of that time, I understood Berry’s central idea from the inside without knowing it had a name: that when we move away from our native land, we feel displaced and absolved. The welfare of the new place, its upkeep, its future, none of it feels like our responsibility.

I moved to Bengaluru in my twenties for work. Born into a Malayali family in New Delhi in the 80s, raised in Kerala in the 90s, Bollywood songs and jalebis, Yesudas and fish curry, I arrived here as a stranger to the language, the food, the culture. I learnt just enough Kannada to get 9 km to my office by bus. No more. In my mind, the city was temporary. An assignment with a time limit. You don’t invest in a place you’re planning to leave.

Between 14-hour workdays and the weight of family expectations, there was no room for anything else anyway. My colleagues spoke English. My identity stayed that of a visitor. Bengaluru was where I worked, not where I lived.

I let this go on for years. Like others who had moved in from other places, I found myself distancing from any responsibility one should feel as a citizen. I assumed that responsibility stayed with people who were from here. I compared the city unfavourably with the place I had come from, with a pride that now embarrasses me slightly.

What changed is harder to pinpoint. Age, maybe. Friendships that crossed the lines I had quietly drawn. At some point the resistance started costing more than it gave.

Berry’s argument is that a place and its people shape you, whether you allow it or not. The question is whether you meet that shaping with openness or with arms crossed. I had spent years with arms crossed.

I slowly put them down. A word of Kannada here, a locally flavoured meal, a road I knew by feel. The city started being home.

I married a proud Kannadiga. For those unfamiliar with India, language, attire and food change every 100-300 kms here. Marrying across that is a big deal. Being accepted across that is a bigger one. My newfound family gave me love and respect I hadn’t anticipated, and never once made me feel like an outsider. I stopped being one.

Now, driving through traffic, walking the green corridors of the city, sitting in a cafe with my coffee, I feel proud to be a citizen of this place. I have arrived. A Kannadiga friend said it better than I could —

You came in as a son in law to this state, but now you have become a son.

Berry writes that a person is more fully alive in a place they have truly committed to. I believe him. The land gave back exactly as much as I was willing to give it.

Wherever life takes me next, whichever city, state or country, I will not make the same mistake twice. Don’t arrive with luggage and leave with nothing.