The Sentinel #1: A Moving Story
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We are often told that we should write about things we know best.
I thought that I will then write about the act of moving and making a new home, from a personal perspective. Beginning afresh on a writing platform on the internet is not a dissimilar process from moving to a new neighborhood.
The United States is often thought of as a country where people are constantly on the move. Yet, a typical American lives only 18 miles away from their mom, according to New York Times Upshot data.1 The median distance is as low as 6 miles(!) in the south, and only 44 miles in the vast open west. Mostly, this proximity is a reflection of how we all yearn for home. Also, not to forget, health care in the United States necessitates poorer families to stay close to aging parents to defray childcare or elderly care costs. This geographic closeness to one’s family varies with age, job, and level of education.
Digging a bit more into the living patterns, I noticed the educational and racial components of living near the family. A 2021 Pew Research2 survey data sheds more light on who lives closer to their parents.
People with postgraduate degrees and Asian Americans are most likely to live furthest from their parents. Aspirations and education intertwine, as we chase opportunities leaving the past behind, and settling in new cities. I suppose that in this way, I am a “typical” data point indeed.
Moving is a constant presence in our lives. It is chiseled in our diasporic experience. I spent most of my years growing up in the same neighborhood within 10 square miles, never knowing the world out there, and am now working in the same research field for the past two decades. Yet, I have moved many times. These moves were caused by a variety of reasons — rising rent, conflicts, evictions, floods, schooling, undergraduate college, graduate school, jobs, and dual-career plans. Still, the earliest move that I remember was my first move as a young child.
When I was a young child, our family lived in one of the tenements in North Madras (now Chennai). My father, who was a new migrant to the city had managed, mostly through the help of his older cousins, to find a job as an attendant at a chemical laboratory nearby. My mother, who grew up in the wide open rural spaces, shockingly found herself as a homemaker in a ramshackle one-room apartment. There was one main “hall room” and a narrow unlit kitchen without windows.
The word ‘apartment’ is a fancy word for those living quarters. Several families lived in a row of tenements that faced each other across a 4-foot narrow alleyway that was accessed through a narrow main entrance. All the households (except the landlord’s family) shared a single bathroom and restroom. It is astonishing to think about how the daily schedules of families were managed.
Ours was the odd last house on the narrow row. It was supposedly built on encroached land, but no one really knows. The ‘cul-de-sac’ alley ended abruptly at an adjoining patchwork of thatched huts. Those huts, even more humble, were separated from us, physically by a marsh dotted with puddles of stagnant rainwater, and socially by an implicit hierarchy. It was later clear to me that we were all just rich in pride.
There was no running water. Outside our door, lay an empty lot and a well from which women of the neighborhood drew water in steel pails and a washing stone where clothes were coaxed into cleanliness. Malnourished children, ill and vitamin deficient, and stray animals were a mainstay, all under the few coconut palms that hovered gigantic in my childhood gaze.
The owner saw no economic sense in health and safety, as the market demand was high, as the space at those cheap rents was still at a premium. He was cantankerous, got into arguments with the tenants, and refused efforts that increased any maintenance cost.
As a five-year-old, I once accidentally locked myself in the house with my infant brother and couldn’t figure out how to unlock the padlock. A crying infant and panicking adults outside are no help. The landlord refused to break the lock, chastizing my mother for leaving us kids in the room, even as other tenants begged him to get the door pried open. His obduracy won out. Eventually, with some assistance, I managed to open the padlock up, after what must have been an interminable wait.
I was reminded of that unsettled neighborhood in recent days with the constant conflicts and meta-obsessions on Twitter. Such a neighborhood may very well thrive. (I am told my old neighborhood still exists). However, it was clear then, that the place was no longer the ideal place for everyone. Soon, our family moved several miles away to another neighborhood where we all spent the next two decades.
I still remember the newness when we moved. Snapshots of the memory persist: My dad unloading kitchen utensils, the AM radio buzzing, blankets folded haphazardly on our deep brown table, the twilight beam on the small van, the exposed rust on the corrugated gate, and the Neptune blue-painted corporation water tank at the end of the street.
There is a certain repetition of expectations we see in migration. The absence of a welcome party and the inscrutable new faces. The sense of being dropped into the middle of a story, and figuring out the rhythms. Much like birth.
So, here I am. New neighborhood. New plans. New home. Still a thousand miles from my mom.
Beginnings are always the same — brimming with hope for the future and dilution of the past.
The present moment is a slender thread connecting novelty and nostalgia.
Join me along as I make a home here. Do subscribe, it’s free.
New York Times. 2015.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/12/24/upshot/24up-family.html
Pew Research Center Survey 2021.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/05/18/more-than-half-of-americans-live-within-an-hour-of-extended-family/
This post resonates with me on so many levels! Loved the inclusion of the Pew research survey data. I used to think that I am being 'forced' to move so far away from home to chase educational/economic opportunities, mostly due to the limited economic resources we had, and that I would have stayed close to home if my family had been wealthy! If that Pew study stratified data by 'wealth' (as opposed to 'income' which. might necessitate 'moving'), I wonder if the distribution would skew right as 'wealth' increased!
My first job was my (bittersweet) experience living in Tiruvottiyur, hearing about North Madras brought back some memories for me too. Glad to find your substack, and in someways I am glad we seem to be making a full circle back to blogging. Hopefully I can get motivated to start as well.