Repat Blues

Anyone know what the word “repat” means?  Well technically it doesn’t exist in the dictionary, but is nevertheless used in common speaking.  It is meant to be the opposite of “expat” or expatriate; in other words, a returning expat is a repat.   That’s what my family and I consider ourselves, as we recently returned to Indian shores after several years outside the country.  To deal with the reverse culture shock that all of us experienced in the first few weeks of our return, I went online to find out how people handled the transition of being repatriated, and thereby discovered the origin of the word “repat”.

So how have us repats being doing since repatriating?  In a word—miserably.  Now my wife and I have spent most of our lives in India, so logically the return home after a few years outside the country shouldn’t have been too difficult.  We always used to make fun of the family NRIs who would come on vacations and insist on drinking only bottled water during their stay here, and term them sissies.  And whoever complained about the traffic, dust, noise and a zillion other irritants of daily life in India were really nothing but snobs, trying to point out the superiority of their existence to that of us lesser mortals in the subcontinent.   Well it’s time to eat humble pie for us now, and it doesn’t taste too great.  Our empathy for those whom we made fun of earlier has never been greater, and I’m pretty sure we will soon be classified in the same category as well.  Be that as it may, and however we may be judged, the fact is that being a repat has been much tougher than we expected.

But the repat who has had it the toughest has been our older son, just 8 but obviously a grown-up in his mind.  He was born in India but hardly lived here.  For him India is a new land, and one very distant from the world he has grown up in and become used to.  His first struggle was to pick up Hindi, something we rarely speak at home where English is the lingua franca (yes I know, we are nothing but Brown Sahibs).  In his innocent way, he has tried so much to meld in that he uses any Hindi words he picks up in any context (Dad and Mum are now addressed as “tu” and everyone is “pagal”) , and deliberately speaks English with a funny accent, an amalgamation of how his various friends/teachers/others speak.  We first found this cute, then slightly irritating, then downright unacceptable and now finally—a little sad.  The dichotomy that he is facing is that on the one hand he wants to fit in, but on the other he is unable to relate to this new place that he has been forced to come to.  He himself summed it up beautifully—“India is my own country, yet I don’t like it.”

So where to for us undergoing the repat blues?  Are we  going to turn into whiners and complain about everything and everyone?  Is India going to become “that country” instead of “our land”?  Certainly an option, but that’s not what we’re going to do.  Looking back from where we were to where we are now, things have improved immensely—the maids come to work on time (mostly), the traffic can be managed (burrow your head deeply into a book and turn the music on high), cable TV is great (and cheap!), broadband has finally arrived in India (and aren’t those 3G ads marvelous!), the malls make for great exercise on weekends,  the food is exactly right (oh how we missed those spices!) and Amitabh is on TV almost every night (he’s still the King, and that’s that).  So will the repat blues go away?  I’m sure they will, with time.  But we still wish we could be expats.