Like the women in Ray and Tagore’s work I find myself today standing by the window, this first day back in Kolkata, still in my airplane clothes, eyes gritty with fatigue and yet unwilling to sleep, because the world is outside these windows and I want to see it and if possible be a part of it. A man passes by carrying a knife sharpening tool on his back. Have you seen them? A block of wood on which is a spinning wheel of sorts that you pedal with your foot like an old sewing machine and you sharpen knives on the wheel. Your body works through it, bending and straightening over the wheel while your hand caresses the edges of the knife testing it for sharpness. A whole family dressed in bright winter woolens pass by. I wonder where they are going. A blue and yellow bus with Alipore Zoo written on it in black paint is stopped to a side. More people in bright sweaters. No blacks or greys or dark blues I suddenly realize, my standard Western garb for winter especially. Two young men, tall and gangly, one in a bright red sweater, the other in a white one. I am loving the colors. It lifts me into being in India and even in this fatigued jet lagged state I want more. There is the smell of wood burning and food cooking and there are the sounds of horns and bells. Kolkata is pushing me to wake up and take it all in.

An immigrant is not just a foreigner in her adopted countries, she becomes eventually as much a foreigner to herself. To whom lies her loyalty? To what language or faith or borders?

The view outside my window in London is of other people’s backyards, other people’s native or foreign lives. A white sun umbrella, clothes drying on a rack, plants in pots, a string of lights and voices of children floating from beyond the walls. Airplanes fly overhead every few minutes. I enjoy gazing up at their sleek frames against the colors of the sky. Sometimes they are close enough that I can read some letters and I can guess the countries they are from, sometimes there are letters on the underbelly, QATAR flies by often and yesterday I thought I saw an American flag on the tail of an airplane but the letters on the side of the distant aircraft seemed to spell out Korea. It was all very intriguing.

A neighbor stopped me on the road yesterday. She said she had met my husband and wanted to say hi. We crossed each other again later in the day and she talked some more, mainly about running to pick her four year old and being ready with a empty stroller to whisk her home. I will bring by satsumas to her house today, bright orange, plump with the promise of autumn, gleaming in a brown paper bag.

In the summer of 2019 I moved to London with my husband, our three children, Joey the labradoodle, my mother, eleven thousand five hundred pounds of furniture, several bicycles and twelve suitcases. It felt like the time to leave America. We took all our worldly possessions with us. Nothing to do with Trump. That time had already passed three years ago.

So here we were three years later, with Brexit on the horizon. A graduate program in London. It felt but right to shift base from one form of immigration led life in to another. Brexit and a different form of racism I was warned by some but the reports and monologues from cab drivers around London seemed to indicate that most people in the UK had been misled about Brexit and what it meant and the struggle to get it off the floor was encouraging. Of course it was naïveté on my part to ignore the many who had expressly voted to be separated from Europe but still one must have hope and somewhere to go. But then it is also general foolhardiness to believe that there was anywhere you could go in the world, whether guns in America or daggers in the UK or bombs elsewhere or the melting arctic or a hole in the ozone layer.

Today a month after our arrival in London, we are set to head back to Seattle and California for a couple of weeks to visit family. Everything is work. Marriages, children, education, groceries, bills, of course but just living in times of walls and immigration raids and then more shootings.

New ones. El Paso, Dayton. You can go out to buy school supplies or drink a glass of wine, you will leave your baby or lover or siblings at home and you will not come back. A lifetime ago, more than three years ago in India on a treadmill in a gym early one morning I had watched another American shooting on the news. Somewhere in this blog full of words I have forgotten what I have written about it. Must be some form of despair I have tread over.

July is the hottest month, two hundred and forty nine mass shootings in 2019 in America, the wall will happen, many walls will happen everywhere, bigger walls, higher walls, the best walls you can find anywhere in the world, walls that will blow your mind by what and who it can keep out and who it will keep within, stuck together till shut down or shot down. Until then I have words to write and lists to make and work to do.

This morning as I talked to my husband about transitions being hard and writers needing space and children running wild in the summer and the need to find a rhythm to our days, he told me he was going to get tape to fix the blinds above our bed that breaks every day. Outside the office window a bird is tweeting without stop, only she sounds like a creaking doorway with no stop to it. Around us, the house is waking which normally means one girl calling out to us or to each other or thumping down the steps. I am surrounded in privileges that I don’t know how to use and often can’t even make sense of. These are supposed to be idyllic summer days. The summer days of my children’s youth, of my husband’s and mine before we grow older and most probably little more tired and world worn. And we are in London. My husband goes to speak to the girls, something about no screen time today is met with loud protests, the door to the girls’ room squeaks too, open and shut. I can’t remember what it is I was saying before my husband left to get the tape to repair the blinds.

How long are you here for? they ask me and it gives me pleasure to be able to say confidently, we are here to stay. Back home in America, I heard of the rally cries to Send her back, but what do I say? There is no back for anyone, unless what you really want to say is You of brown/black and other non-white skin go somewhere else. Anywhere but here. The U.K grapples with their own separate voices and sometimes cab drivers talk to me of Brexit with regret or passion or intrigue. On the walk from Wimbledon station to the Wimbledon tennis grounds, a bearded man in grey clothes handed out cold bottles of water in the name of friendship from Muslims in London. There was a sign with something of that order hanging on the fence behind him. I had smiled at him and he bearded and toothy smiled back widely as I took the water gratefully. The cab driver yesterday, a white balding Britisher with an accent I scrambled to keep up with, told me that his mother was an immigrant. I listened to him explain British politics keenly trying to understand the nuances of what he was saying and what he left unsaid. As I stepped off his cab, I wondered at what new and old experiences of immigration awaited me in this new city.