NRI : Not Really Indian

Three years ago, I moved to the US. Standard Asian immigrant story: tech company, brutal remote hours, earned my stripes, finally got moved over.

I had barely settled in when the pandemic shut the world down. Flights stopped, borders closed, and my only connection to home was video calls and—of course—Bollywood.

Everyone had warned me the first few years in America would be about “fitting in.” I braced for that… and then it never really came. Adorable San Francisco let me be myself. The Bay Area—with its massive Indian community and absurdly good food—felt like an India extension campus.

Even after three years, the only things that truly changed were that I learned how to load the dishwasher, drive a car, and identify a screwdriver. The rest of me, almost stubbornly, stayed the same.

My preferred language is still Hinglish—to the point that even my non‑Indian teammates now say “Chalo, done” and “Abe yaar” in meetings.

I listen to Bollywood almost exclusively.
I eat Indian food for most meals.
I wear Indian clothes often, occasion agnostic.
I celebrate Diwali every year at home and at work. Once, I convinced more than a hundred colleagues to turn up in saris and kurta‑pyjamas—Fabindia made a fortune that week—sit through a Lakshmi–Ganesh puja with English subtitles at an all‑hands, and learn how to eat pani puri and aloo paratha with their hands.
I still visit a small Shiva temple every time I feel lost, and I still meditate with the Mahamrityunjaya Mantra.
I’ve fallen in love with Broadway, but my comfort watch is still desi comedy and desi community theatre.

My address had changed. But yeh dil hai Hindustani.

So when I finally flew “back home” this year, I thought I knew what to expect.

I didn’t.

Because while I hadn’t really changed, how my country saw me had changed completely.

To them, I wasn’t the home girl who went abroad for a bit. I was an NRI with an American PR. For me, that was just my work visa status. For them, it meant something much heavier: a decision to stay away for good.

The visa, in their minds, was a verdict. I had chosen to leave them, which meant they could now choose to leave me.

My struggle to “fit in” was just beginning—at home.

I fought it at first.

I wore Indian clothes every day.
I switched from Hinglish to shuddh Hindi.
I chose auto‑rickshaws instead of Ubers.
I visited relatives I hadn’t seen in years, chasing some old version of our bond.
I went to temples with my mom, covering my head and following customs I no longer fully understood.
I tried to reconnect with the house help who had watched me grow up. I walked the lanes of my childhood, desperate to feel rooted again.

It didn’t work.

Slowly, it dawned on me: I finally understood their version of the NRI label.

NRI: Not Really Indian.

In the authoritative voice of the neighborhood aunty, here’s my “case file”:

I’m tall, a partner at a top tech firm, hold three postgraduate degrees, live in the US, and own my home. On paper, that’s their dream Indian man, not their daughter. How do you marry off a woman who has accidentally become the groom?

I’m in my late thirties and unmarried—automatic “spoiled goods.” People looked at me like I was irreparably broken, and kept their daughters at a distance in case it was contagious.

I don’t cook. My thoughtful, store‑bought gifts couldn’t compete with the homemade coconut barfi their daughters‑in‑law had brought over the previous evening.

Most of these women had never worked outside the home. They looked at my promotions not as achievements but as steps in the wrong direction—further away from the only goal they truly valued: having children.

I don’t understand luxury labels, and I’m perfectly happy in a $10 Amazon t‑shirt. Soon I stopped getting invited to family events. There was a quiet fear I’d turn up in a “cheap salwar kameez” and embarrass the family.

My visible tattoos and eyebrow piercing made it easy to fill in the rest of the story: obviously I was “doing drugs” and “sleeping around.” No questions asked, no facts required.

When I spoke honestly about learning to wash dishes and cook my own food in the US, they didn’t hear growth or independence. They heard that I’d voluntarily left a comfortable life in India just to “become a maid” abroad.

In their eyes, I had failed on every metric that mattered. So they were strangely comfortable handing me over to a country they didn’t care about.

NRI, then, became something else: Not Required (in) India.

I know this isn’t everyone. I know—and desperately hope—that this is a narrow slice of patriarchal north India, not the whole country. But this was my slice. This was the place that raised me. And walking through it as an outsider felt less like travel and more like being quietly orphaned.

And yet, thousands of kilometres away, in the Bay Area, there were people who had never known me as a child and never seen my “potential” version—only the fully complicated, tattooed, late‑thirties one. They let me in anyway.

They opened their homes, WhatsApp groups, and dinner tables. They learnt how to say my name properly. They laughed at my very specific Delhi jokes. They showed up when things were hard.

Somewhere between the tech campuses, the desi grocery stores, and the crowded living rooms where we argued about politics and shared biryani, I realised something that NRIs don’t always say out loud: home isn’t the place that claims you. It’s the place that chooses you back.

Home is where you feel seen and valued. You’re not always born into that family. Sometimes, you get adopted.

For me, the United States isn’t just where I live or where my green card sits in a folder. It’s the place that looked at an Indian woman who no longer fit the script—and made room for her anyway.

This NRI may not be “really Indian” by the old definitions. But she’s finally, fully at hom.