I am home. Like many Indians living in the US, I visit the homeland in winter. A time when ticket prices are at an all-time high due to school holidays, travel agents are cocky, and you increasingly ignore their advice and buy directly online. A time when Calcutta weather is best with the aroma of notungurer sandesh and pyanjkoli in bloom. The flight is long, nearly 24 hours, with all the connections and hours of waiting at strange airports, but the minute you touchdown all that becomes a blur. Everything looks good! Even though you complain that the signage for the Overseas Citizen of India cardholders is most obscure, you still can’t help saying “kamon achen” to the good man at the immigration counter. Shoulders straighten, you walk taller and even at Customs your voice sounds stronger. Why not, you are home! No foreign accents, no one asking where you are from, and no sense of displacement.

I visit Calcutta often so I am no longer surprised by the new flyovers and posh housing along the airport route or the spread of mobile technology. But everything is far from familiar. In spite of my regular sojourns, I am still surprised at the ever-growing rise of snazzy entertainment channels, the plethora of international stories — not seen in the US — in the Indian media, and the freshness and taste of just regular, just average everyday home food.

But the more frequent your visits to India, the more you realise how many parallel homelands exist around the world. When asked what can I send back with you by a motherly relative today it took me a long time to figure out what I don’t get in my adopted land. Then I mumbled homemade pickles, but not the Punjabi or the Gujarati types, they are all there in NY. Unlike the generations of the 60s and 70s who travelled great distances to buy Indian goodies, or waited for years to come to the homeland to satisfy their cravings, little desi stores from San Francisco to Boston in today’s America sell everything from coconut hair oil to dosa mixes.

And it’s not just the food and the living essentials, Indian communities all over the US have created replicas of the homeland in many different ways. In Houston the quintessential Durgabari has become so much more. From summer workshops teaching Bengali history to hosting visiting Indian dancers, all are part of the annual mix. A hub of community activity, on any Sunday you see youngsters jostling to lead cultural nights and Bollywood dances, volunteering at the temple library, or rehearsing theatre shows, while their parents debate Bengal’s politics. While purists may snigger at the Rabindrasangeet merging unselfconsciously with songs of OSO at Durgabari, what it gives the local Bengali community is an identity, their home away from home.

Mirroring these relatively newer immigrants who moved to the US in the last 40 years are also older Indian communities like those in the island states of the Caribbean. Having left Indian shores during British Raj to work as indentured labourers in countries like Trinidad, Surinam, Guyana and others, they have long lost their Indian accents, or their ability to speak Hindi. But what they have built is the Indian identity and a replica of the motherland, through celebrating Indian festivals, eating roti and chana and following what else — Indian blockbusters. No longer does it surprise me to stand at Penn Station in Manhattan and discuss the hotness of Hrithik Roshan with a Guyanese worker as she sells me my morning coffee as I rush to work. Her links to India may only be through her great-grand mother who was brought to work on the sugar plantations of Guyana, she may never visit the homeland, but her knowledge of Hindi movies, Diwali rituals and sari fashions certainly gives me my morning dose of Indian bonding.

And speaking of bonding, what is it that still pulls one to the real homeland? What is it that compels my friends to save up their short vacations, spend thousand of dollars and lock up their homes come winter, to visit Calcutta every year or two? Is it the ageing parents who wait eagerly for them, is it the bliss of shopping for the now globally fashionable Indian wares, is it to make their children build connections with their country, or is it just the complete sense of belonging ? Whatever it is, it’s good to be home.