LEAVING AHMEDABAD

I am doing a final check to make sure I have everything - passport, tickets, contact addresses and phone numbers - last minute instructions to the household help. I am leaving on a three-week trip abroad. Just as I reach the front door, my mother-in-law comes and applies a tilak on my forehead followed by grains of rice, presses 101 rupees into my hand and hugs me.

I am puzzled because this has never happened before. This is not my first trip out of the country; neither is this some long trip away from home … Suddenly it clicked into place. This traditional ritual was being done because I was I was going to the place which is every Gujarati’s idea of El Dorado - the United States of America.

This place has such a special place in the Gujarati heart that they often do not even refer to it by name; they refer to it as tyaan or ‘There’! I first realised this while taking off my shoes outside a doctor’s clinic and saw a young man taking off a pair of the most beautifully embroidered boots. I admired them and asked him where he had got them and he smiled proudly and answered in a single word that said it all - tyaan. (Its a bit like when a married woman refers to somebody as woh (He) you know she is talking about her husband!).

So here I am, off to the US after a ritual send-off, finally feeling a ‘complete’ Gujarati!