I’ve been having situationships with cities all my life

On choosing elusivity instead of exclusivity

What commitment to a place actually looks like to me | Halifax, 2025.

Goa was abuzz with its annual arts festival when I found a table at a café in Panaji last month. Artists and curators occupied most of the tables, laptops open, festival lanyards still around their necks. I’d found a table near the window and was trying to read, but kept getting distracted by the crowds outside: people moving between installations, stopping to photograph the old Portuguese facades, chatting excitedly into the sidewalk.

A man about my age asked if he could share my table — I said yes — and we fell into the easy conversation you have with strangers at festivals. What brought you here, have you seen the exhibits yet, where are you staying.

“So where are you really from?” he asked eventually.

“I’m from here,” I said. “I’m Goan.”

There was a pause. It wasn’t long, but it was noticeable. He looked at me — my (lack of an) accent, maybe, or just the fact that I’d taken a phone call in Marathi earlier. Something didn’t quite fit. But he nodded.

“Oh, nice. I’m from Bangalore. First time here for the festival.”

And that was that. He didn’t push. After all, how could he? He was a visitor, and in the grander hierarchy of belonging that governs these interactions in India, I was clearly more entitled to this place than he was. I had ancestry here, a surname that traces back centuries. He had a hotel booking and a weekend pass.

I accepted my position in that hierarchy easily, perhaps too easily. The night before, my parents had been talking about how Goa feels different now, about changes in the neighbourhood and in the demographics, about how the place they’d visited since children and now lived in for nearly a decade keeps shifting around them. I’d mostly listened. They’re entitled to those observations in a way I’m not. I may live here on paper now, but I’m hardly ever here — always off traveling for one convenient reason or another. They’re rooted in a way I’m not, and that rootedness gives them a different claim to this place. I can show up and leave before I have to reckon with what it actually means to stay.

The man across from me finished his coffee and left. I sat there a while longer, thinking about what I’d just done. The answer I’d given him — that I was Goan — had come instinctively, the way it always does when someone asks. It’s the answer that works, the one that often requires no elaboration, the one that positions me correctly in the hierarchy of belonging in a society where ancestry supersedes residency. But even as I said it, I was aware of how much of my belonging here is narrated rather than inhabited.

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The real issue, if I’m being honest, isn’t that I’ve tried to belong somewhere and failed. It’s that I don’t think I’ve ever fully wanted to belong anywhere. Or rather, I’ve never committed to wanting to belong in the way that would make the desire meaningful. I’ve lived too long in provisional states — cities entered with expiry dates, places inhabited with one eye on departure — that the expectation of belonging didn’t even occur to me.

When my family moved to the Gulf, we did so with the explicit understanding that we were temporary residents. Over time, my father’s contract kept getting extended and we stayed. In modern dating parlance, it was us “going with the flow” without any future commitment; Muscat and I were “seeing each other” or at best “dating,” but we never had the conversation about going exclusive. I’ve been having situationships with cities ever since.

Even when I moved to Edinburgh for university, I went thinking I’d return to India after my degree, and that conviction defined the emotional contract I signed with the place. I didn’t demand welcome in the way someone from there (or someone wanting to settle there) might, because I didn’t feel entitled to an inheritance that wasn’t mine. And so when I got my permanent residency in the UK, it felt like a betrayal of an idea of home that was elsewhere, rooted in an India I had hardly ever lived in but felt I owed something. That something was a promise of eventual return, even if I didn’t know how or when that eventuality would materialise. And now, at least bureaucratically, I had broken it.

This might change, of course. If tomorrow I decide that I want to live in one city for the rest of my life — to stay, to build, to be rooted — I imagine I would develop a more visceral yearning to belong there. After all, with commitment comes appetite; with permanence comes grievance.

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In Mother Mary Comes to Me, Arundhati Roy recalls one of her earliest conversations with Pradip, who would later become her husband. They meet when they’re both living in Delhi and he asks her where she’s from. She pauses, then answers: “I’m … well … I’m here now.” Later, she explains that far from being a slogan, her answer was just “the personal feelings of an off-grid drifter” in a world increasingly fractured into identities and allegiances.

But what that answer acknowledges, at least in my reading of it, is that there will always be people who belong more than you do. Sons of the soil, in the literal and emotional sense. And rather than fighting that hierarchy or resenting it, the drifter accepts it as a fact of life.

Jeet Thayil’s The Elsewhereans approaches the same terrain from a different direction, but arrives at a similar unease. The book, part-fiction, part-memoir, circles around his parents and the long afterlives of migration. Early on, it is Thayil’s mother, Ammu, who expresses the strongest belief in rootedness. She is a Malayali before she is anything else, we are told. And yet, it is Ammu who later realises the limits of that conviction. After decades of living elsewhere, she and her husband return to Kerala — the ancestral home they had imagined returning to all along — only to find that it no longer receives them in the way they had imagined. “Kerala has changed and they have too,” writes Thayil. “There’s no sense of belonging or welcome. They’ve lived Elsewhere too long: they’ve become Elsewhereans.”

What makes this moment devastating is that it comes not from someone indifferent to place, but from someone who cared deeply about it. Distance, Thayil suggests, doesn’t just change where you live. It changes who you are. And return doesn’t undo that.

Both Roy and Thayil offer different ways of answering — or bypassing? — the question. One anchors itself stubbornly in the present tense; the other accepts drift as a permanent condition. Both refuse the fantasy that origin stories can be made coherent if you just explain them properly.

I met Jeet at the Bangalore launch of The Only City, an anthology on Bombay to which he had contributed a story. At the event, he said something that stayed with me: that for someone who has left Bombay, he misses Bombay most when he’s in Bombay.

That inversion felt familiar. I don’t miss Mumbai when I’m in, say, Rome. I miss it when I’m eating a vada pav in Colaba, or standing at a pani puri stall near Juhu chowpatty, the city suddenly bringing back memories of when Aai would take young me around her old haunts. I miss London not when I’m here in India, but when I’m cycling through Richmond Park or walking by the Thames past St Paul’s. And I miss Muscat when I’m watching the waves hit the shore off Shatti beach, the Arabian Sea stretching out from where it left off all those years back when I took a one-way flight out.

Goa complicates this most of all. Anywhere else, when asked where I’m from, I say “Goa” instinctively — the answer I’d just given the man at the café — and it’s readily accepted. Sometimes there’s a nod of recognition; at other times I’m questioned about my Hindu last name, and I fall into the familiar defence: Goa is more than pork vindalho, beaches, and beers, there are many Hindus here, we’re just not the ones tourists meet. And that makes me feel good, because isn’t this what someone from a place does? Explains, educates, lays claim to a history.

But sitting in that café, watching the festival crowds make plans to go drinking at a bar in Anjuna or a club in Baga, I was reminded again of how partial my Goa actually is. The Goa I know is inherited: ancestral villages, temple rituals, homecooked seafood, and stories of Hindu migration during the Inquisition. It’s the Goa my parents showed me. I’ve gone drinking in Mumbai and Bangalore, clubbing in Delhi, made the kind of memories young people make in cities. But in Goa, because it’s supposed to be where I’m from, I’ve only ever related to it through ancestry. The contemporary Goa, the one where people my age actually live and make plans and have local knowledge, the one of new bridges and local politics, of knowing which beaches to go to and which to avoid, exists parallel to me. That Goa is foreign to me because I have been too busy trying to inherit another Goa. And so, the Goa I claim so easily in conversation is not the same one I experience when I’m in it.

Which means that even here, in the place where I can claim the strongest ancestral credentials, there’s a different measure of belonging I don’t possess. The man at the café deferred to my ancestry, but someone who grew up here, who went to school here or who moved to work here, who knows the place through daily life rather than genealogy, belongs in a way I never will.

In Goa, I have the inheritance but not the life. Everywhere else — Muscat, Edinburgh, London — I had the life but not the inheritance. And perhaps I’m not avoiding any of these places themselves, but the duty that comes with claiming one fully. To accept a home means being accountable to it, not just through blood or temporary residence but through the accumulated weight of daily choices and consequences. I’ve spent so long being an adopted son of many lands that I’m wary of acknowledging a permanent filial relationship with any one of them.

That’s the cost of being a permanent drifter: you learn to live with partial belonging everywhere, even in places where you are, technically, a son of the soil.

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In Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin wrote, “perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.” I don’t dispute the condition. I know I’m marked by the places that made me. What unsettles me is the question of what I owe in return. To accept a home is not just to feel held by it, but to be held accountable to it. And while I accept that accountability easily when it comes to people — the filial duty I owe my parents, the responsibility that comes with being an only son in a desi family that has given me a great deal of love — I’m less certain what it means to owe a land. If I call a place home in anything more than name, does that translate into duty? To remain, to serve, to protect, to belong not just emotionally but materially?

So when people ask where I’m from, the discomfort isn’t so much about geography as it is about commitment — about whether I’m willing to stay long enough to earn the answer, whether I’m ready, after all these years of casual arrangements with cities, to finally have the conversation.

But for now, the only response I have that feels honest is a partial one that, like me, is borrowed from other elsewheres: I’m an Elsewherean, but … well … I’m here now.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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