Ally and Devendra in Ahmedabad. "This is your home."
Forty Years Later, Still Home.
By Allyson Domanski
A New Year’s Day call came from India. “Allyson,” the voice from afar crackled, not from distance but quavering from agedness. “Do come visit,” urged Devendra with the same paternal affection he’d always shown me. “This is your home.”
His son Taral had handed him the phone after I said I’d try my best to come on the return leg of our upcoming Asia trip. Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and Indonesia are hardly next door to India, but I promised to try and talk Gary into stopping in Ahmedabad. Then and there I began working on my husband, once the tears that had welled from Devendra’s entreating had subsided.
Forty years earlier, I arrived at Ahmedabad’s living room-sized airport after flying two days, steamer trunk and boxed bicycle in tow. As Canada’s 1986 Commonwealth scholar researching homelessness in India for my master’s thesis in city planning, I was initially placed at a Ladies Hostel where I, aged 26, faced the same smothering 8pm curfew as all its teenaged charges under our warden. I’d heard about “paying guest” arrangements, met prospective householders and soon moved in with the first of “my families.”
They took in an English speaker to improve their then-teenaged sons’ language skills in exchange for 50 bucks Canadian per month for room, board, love, care, nurturing and the lifelong familial connection that grew out of it. Now in their eighties, their offspring’s offspring are university graduates. Despite being half a world away for four decades, we’ve never lost touch.
Living with them for a year I wore sari or salwar kameez, a stud in my pierced nostril, a forehead bindi for special occasions. I sat cross-legged on the ground. Ate with my right hand. Went full vegetarian. Learned enough Gujarati to get by. Travelled Second Class rail. Studied with nose to the grindstone when April temperatures reached 43 degrees Celsius (110°F) and endured nights with but a dampened sheet and a lazily whirling fan above to cool me. I explored Ahmedabad – and India – from the seat of my “foreign cycle” as they called it.
The tall blond Caucasian girl would never blend, but embracing assimilation open-mindedly did get me accepted. Culture shock on return to Canada was harder than arrival in India.
A month after Devendra’s New Year’s call, we departed Canada on one-way tickets. Every so often I’d butter up Gary. “It’s not that out of the way,” I’d plead. “They’re getting on. We haven’t been there since 2009. With our folks now gone, Devendra and Hema are the only ‘parents’ I have left.” Gary understood but couldn’t yet commit.
We were in Hanoi when the US and Israel struck Iran. Flights cancelling, airfares skyrocketing. This complicated my task.
In Bali a month later came another call. I put it on Speaker so Gary could hear.
“Allyson, are you coming? We are so wanting to see you and Gary,” beseeched Devendra. “Remember, this is your home!”
Gary heard it as plainly as I did. Home needn’t denote birthplace. Home is a feeling that can transcend origins.
We booked flights. Ahmedabad in April.
Because I’d come home, the extended family came to dinner. We were 26. I knew all but a few from the third generation but knew who they belonged to.
Our five days sped by, joining one family member or another for dinners, outings, visits or drives to see how Ahmedabad had changed. Its sprawl endless, its new airport gleamingly massive to host the 2030 Commonwealth Games and bolster Ahmedabad’s 2036 Olympics bid. Cows gone from the city. Poutine now available. Skyscrapers, highways and flyovers abound. The Sabarmati, so bone-dry in the 1980s that its riverbed was populated by the impoverished and utilised by textile mills to sun-dry dyed bolts of unfurled fabric, now flows with water flanked on both sides by bike paths.
We spent quality time with everyone at home, basking in the love-in. My goodbyes to those in their eighties were not without tears.
Allyson Domanski, who once bicycled around the world with her husband Gary and has visited 94 countries, is retired from work in Ottawa but never from traveling.
