After four nights of tossing and turning, tonight I slept through the night. It has been four days since we made a decision to return to India. The thought of returning home was never far from my mind, but taking it from there and replanting it in the center of the mental space has taken more effort than I thought.

I had explored the inside and out of the malleable concepts of "home" and "roots" when I made the documentary, but sorting someone else's thoughts is infinitely easier than sorting ones own. With yourself, you don't know where to begin or which end is up.

To NRIs( Non Resident Indians) the "Will you stay ,Will you go" discussion is at the center of most gatherings or even casual meetings. We talk about it ad infinitum. I have too. Now the time has come to put my money where the mouth is...and it ain't fun, I can tell you that.

There are people who draw up lengthy Excel spreadsheets detailing the pros and cons, benefits and losses and those that feel that the fact that you have to draw up a list is a ridiculous way of rationalizing a perfectly human instinct to go home at the end of a hard days work.

I straddle these two. I do not have any rosy ideas fed by years of nostalgia about living in India. It will be tough especially after the honeymoon phase with friends , relatives and even immediate family is over. Then what? Will the axe of realization fall? The corruption, the pollution and my least favorite - the meddlesomeness of everyone and quiet literally their aunty in everything you do/don't do/plan to do/don't plan to do. Hopefully this is just my hyper-active alert imagination. Hopefully I will be able to take these on ( I have in the past after all!). The temptation to stay is strong, yet, the reason for going back are so personal that , that alone is a deal breaker.

Then there are these other rather calming thoughts- the world is smaller, Indian economy and media are "on a boom"( though all that goes up must come down) and the biggest one of them all, this- I remember clear as the water in Lake Tahoe, the day I arrived in the US. The United Airlines stewardess announced that we were ready to land. I remember my hands growing clammy and feeling as if someone had pulled the lungs out of my chest. The fact that I had left behind a fairly cushy well paying job and the comforts of home to come study in the US, to arrive in a city where I knew one person vaguely and who I was banking on to come pick me up did not seem like such a hot idea for that half -hour before landing. Thus I arrived one cold COLD San Francisco summer day. For the next few years I lived in a room in someone's garage with no heat and industrial carpet, making laughable money (and paying most of it for the garage). After about two years someone broke into the garage and took pretty much everything of any value that I owned including a camera I had managed to buy with my savings( I was good at my work and got a better title and raise). Dammit! Start again!

So to cut a rather long and interesting story ( that I can dine off on for years to come) short, I survived this and many other things (note to self- blog those before you forget!) - Even as I wake up in the middle of the night sometimes with thoughts of doom and of becoming the regretful old hag who "once lived in America" , I think I will be O.K.