Coming back

Coming back

Counterpoint to a previous voice on this site about why someone stayed: this is from someone who didn't, and then did.

I left for an MS in 2014. I lived in the United States for ten years. I had what an outside observer would call the standard immigrant success story: degree, job at a big tech company, green card, savings account, an apartment in a nice part of a nice city. By any spreadsheet, the math worked.

I came back last year. Here is the unromantic version of why.

The math is incomplete

The spreadsheet does not have a column for the texture of an evening walk. It does not have a column for being able to call your mother and have her come over in fifteen minutes because your kid has a fever. It does not have a column for the friend you have known since you were eight, or the way the light falls in Patan in October.

It is not that those things mean more than money or career trajectory. It is that they are not on the same axis. You don't trade them off — you just notice, after enough years, that one column has been silently emptying out.

The infrastructure is real

I will not lie about it. The power still cuts out. The roads in winter are bad. The air quality in the dry season is genuinely harmful. You get less efficient at most things. You spend more energy than you used to on things that should not require energy.

I am not arguing that this is fine. I am arguing that I am willing to pay the cost.

The pull

The thing that finally moved me was small. My grandmother had a stroke. I flew home for the week. I sat with her, ate dal-bhat at 8pm with my parents, walked back through Mangal Bazaar at night past the temples I had forgotten the names of. The next morning I bought a one-way ticket and gave a month's notice on Monday.

It is a cliché but I'll say it: the things that matter to me were not where I was living.

Is it for everyone

No. Most of my classmates are still abroad. They are happy. They are doing important work. I am not saying I made the right choice and they made the wrong one — I am saying I made the choice that was right for me. Almost everything we do, in the end, is like that.

The version of me here

The version of me that I like best is the one that walks to the corner shop in flip-flops at 9pm to buy curd, and the shopkeeper knows my mother's name, and the temple dog at the end of the street knows mine.

That's the column the spreadsheet was missing.