Indian-American Identity: Finding Home Between Two Cultures

It is easy to see the beginning of a life somewhere new, and much harder to see the moment it became home. I can tell you the year I landed. I cannot tell you the year San Francisco stopped being the place I was staying and started being the place I was from.

A few years ago we were in a cab in Paris, and the driver asked where we were from. My husband and I answered together, "San Francisco." Our seven-year-old leaned forward from the back seat and corrected us on the spot. "No, they're from India. I'm from the U.S."

We laughed, and then immediately started explaining ourselves to a stranger. His answer had taken half a second. Ours had taken a paragraph, footnotes included.

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Fear, Excitement, and Ambition

I think the three feelings that defined those first years were fear, excitement, and ambition, arriving together and refusing to take turns. I had no real sense of where I would end up. I studied in Arizona, and during those years I visited San Francisco once, in the middle of the tech boom, and stood on a street somewhere downtown thinking, with no plan attached to the thought, that I was going to come back here one day and work. Somehow I did.

The fear was about not knowing where I'd land. The excitement was about discovering I could build something entirely on my own terms, with no inherited script to follow. The ambition was about wanting to be near people who were building things, because I wanted room to grow. They sat together, crowding the same small apartment I was renting at the time.

A family navigating life and building a home between two cultures

Foldable Proof of a Real Place

I still have things from home scattered through the house we eventually bought here. Silk carpets from Kashmir. My mother's shawls, some of which were hers and some of which were her mother's before her. They function as decoration if you don't know their history. But they are proof, physical and foldable, that a place and the people in it were real, even from a distance that made them start to feel like something I might have invented.

The Complicated Arc of Food

Food carried its own complicated arc. For years I cooked with the windows open, not for ventilation, but because I didn't want the smell to follow me out the door and announce something about myself I wasn't ready to announce. That particular self-consciousness took a long time to burn off.

Now I find myself doing the opposite, telling people, wait, you have to try our food, because I'm Kashmiri and Kashmiri food isn't the handful of familiar dishes most people picture when they hear the word Indian. Different spices. Different techniques. Half our dishes don't even use the onion and tomato base people assume is universal. I like watching the moment someone realizes there isn't one Indian food; there are dozens of regions folded into that single overused word.

Not every food memory earned its keep gracefully. At a work lunch once, I mistook wasabi for avocado with total confidence and paid for it in front of my entire team. I've never made that mistake again, and the story outlived the embarrassment by years.

Sharing cultural traditions and building identity with the next generation

Friendships in Unplanned Layers

Friendships arrived in layers I didn't design. First through my first job. Then through other Indian families, where a shared festival could turn strangers into something closer to family within a season, because celebrating something familiar thousands of miles from where it originated does that to people faster than almost anything else. Later, through my own children, whose friendships at school somehow became the architecture for most of my adult social life. I met someone at pickup once. Years later, she is someone I call when something actually matters.

Two Homes in Different Registers

San Francisco is home now, in every sense that counts. We bought the house here. Our children were born here. Our people, the ones who show up, are here. But India is still home too, in a different register, the way a language you no longer speak fluently is still the one you dream in occasionally.

I go back every few years. Kashmir in particular has never loosened its grip on me, no matter how settled I've become three thousand miles away. One thing I still haven't done, and would like to, is bring my parents and my children there together, so the place stops being a story my kids have heard secondhand and becomes somewhere they've actually stood, snow and all.

I came here wanting to build a career. I ended up building a life instead, one unremarkable decision at a time. I don't think I'll ever cleanly choose one home over the other, and at some point I stopped expecting that I would need to. Until then, I publish stories that give my children and many others like them clarity and a sense of identity; perhaps it is more for the parents and me as well.

What is the one physical artifact—a shawl, a recipe, a book—that serves as foldable proof of your first home in your second? Tell us below.

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