One Saturday in the spring of my junior year, I was driving back with a friend of mine from a fieldwork session for a class project. We’d turned the volume up on the aux and were singing along to Noah Kahan, plaintively crooning the chorus – “One day I'm… gonna cut it clear, ride like Paul Revere/ And when they ask me who I am, I'll say I'm not from around here”. As the instrumental bridge started, Aadya sat up in the passenger seat and said, as if to herself, “Man, I really miss Massachusetts…”She was born in Boston, so this wasn’t a huge surprise, but on a whim I asked her why. “It just feels like home,” was all she said.
As a Stanford student who spent most of my life in India, many of my friends return there for the holidays, and many more travel across the United States to go home to their parents every summer and winter. To varying degrees, almost all of them express a deep desire to go home. I’ve never really understood that. My family lives decently close to campus, in San Diego (the perfect distance, far enough that they can’t just visit whenever but still only an hour’s flight away), but I’ve never felt particularly driven to return there. It’s nice to get a break from the Stanford rat race and nice to see my dog (and family) again, but other than that, there’s nothing.
It might be that I have no memories in San Diego, no people other than my family that I’m particularly close to. While I was born there, I grew up in Bangalore, India, and my family only returned to San Diego about three months before I started college – not a lot of time for making memories. On the other hand, India doesn’t hold that sort of draw for me either, though that might be for other reasons. I grew up, you see, in Laughing Waters – one of Bangalore’s 25,000 gated communities, and one that was full of undeveloped plots of land left to grow wild and covered in trees. It was amazing; every day brought new frontiers and mysterious lands to explore, and I will always cherish that time. Since leaving, though, word from my remaining friends there is that many of those plots have been built up, the habitats they once held lost, and almost all the people I knew there have now left. What’s the point of returning to a place if there are no people there that you love? Well, in this case at least, I suppose the trees might be worth it.
Pedon Ki Chhaon Mein (In The Shadows Of The Trees)
One of my earliest memories is of being sung to sleep. It was our first night after moving in, a new house in a new neighbourhood. Everything felt off and I was tired, so I asked my father to sing me a song. He went with the same one he always had, an old Hindi song that my grandfather particularly enjoyed. Thandi hawa, yeh chandni suhaani, ae mere dil suna koi kahaani… I didn’t understand the words, but his soothing voice and the familiar tune soon lulled me away from the waking world. In the morning when I woke, I was soon ready to explore the new neighbourhood – and explore I did.
In my little childhood slice of heaven, the community lived under the rule of gargantuan rain trees. These generous giants had always been there and always would be, and I adored them. A rain tree, you see, was the guardian par excellence for a young boy who loved to play make-believe, liked being outside, and was endlessly fascinated by animals. The fallen branches, with their knobby leaf-scars and smooth, slightly fuzzy texture, made perfect wands and walking sticks for whatever variety of wizard or mystical space warrior my friends and I wanted to be that week; the radiating boughs, like some magnificent stag’s antlers, made perfect perches for entire food chains, from skittering beetles to chatterbox squirrels and the ever-present, majestic pariah kites; and above it all, above the myriad scurrying lives of ants and lizards and humans, the spreading canopies of the mature trees cast their protective mantles. We could walk, under those trees, in the height of a May midsummer’s day, and feel not a trace of the sun’s burning warmth as we explored the worlds hidden within the humus-scented green shade; we could walk, under those trees, in the depths of a June monsoon, and yet escape the stinging arrows of the rain fired down by the amassed clouds as we laughingly made a game of dodging the stray drops that fell as water accumulated on the leaves.
The rest of Bangalore was as different from this as could be. My memories of India’s Garden City are coloured grey, filled with the acrid smog of traffic and the sputtering rumble of autorickshaws and motorbikes. I lived in a tiny bubble of wilderness amidst the rampant growth of the apartments and malls, and it was the perfect little Indian rainforest. I was the luckiest kid in the world! Or I was, anyway, until I moved across the world in July of 2021.
In my mind, San Diego looked like a mediaeval map stitched together from stories my parents had told me. Here be Pandas. In Days of Yore here abode the Shirhattis. Place of Varun’s Birth. To me, San Diego was composed of the zoo, SeaWorld, the houses of my parents and their old friends, the hospital where I was born, and not much else. When I finally arrived, though, this mystical city was very different from both Bangalore and Laughing Waters. Gone were the tightly-packed buildings – and cars – by Marathahalli Bridge, gone were the towering monarchs of my childhood; it was time to say hello to desert scrub, the suburbs of Poway, and the rivers of traffic raging along State Highway 15. In short, it was hell. Even if I had to live here, though, I vowed to myself that I would always hold in my mind that idyllic Indian forest where I grew up. It was a defining aspect of not only my life experiences but my relationship to nature and, in no small part, of my identity as an Indian.
Tell Everybody I’m On My Way, New Friends And New Places to See
The time soon came for me to leave San Diego and move once again to another near-mythical land – college. The fabled Stanford University certainly felt larger than life, and I was instantly swept off my feet by the mad currents of freshman year. I tried to get to know my dormmates (and only partially succeeded), got rejected from Stanford’s South Asian a cappella group (which sent me into a deep depression for a week during which I barely spoke), and tried to figure out just what the heck an Engineering Quad was (though I did find it in the end, just in time for my first discussion section). Something good that came out of that first quarter, though, was that I finally started to pick up some Hindi. Four weeks in, I’d made my first real friend, another Indian student from Bombay who didn’t care that my grammar was atrocious or that I couldn’t find the right word for ‘dining hall’ without switching to English. Those six weeks made me more comfortable with Hindi than eleven years of studying it in school; I finally felt like I could start to call myself Indian. (Especially considering that in the process, I’d learned the Hindi equivalents of every English curseword I knew and then some – not that I’d ever use them, of course.)
All too soon, it was time to return to San Diego for the summer. During the break, I finally got a chance to make music again – while I’d been gone, not only had my family finished settling into their new house, but my brother had joined the school band and was suddenly some kind of piano prodigy. This suited me just fine – even if I hadn’t gotten the chance to sing a cappella, I’d still learned that I much preferred performing music with my voice to playing an instrument. This meant that my family now had almost the perfect composition for a band. We started to spend time sitting in the drawing room together, just jamming out – my brother’s fingers dancing across the piano’s, my father picking away on the guitar, and myself singing, with my mother joining in whenever we could convince her.
The first piece we learned together was a classic for our family, the same song that my grandfather and father both used to sing to put us to sleep. Thandi Hawa Yeh Chandni Suhani, ‘This Cold Breeze and Pleasant Moonlight’. It was one of the few songs we all knew, and we’d sung it together before. Now, though, with everyone dedicated fully to their chosen forms of music, it finally sounded complete. More than that, I finally felt like I understood the song. My father always used to play music whenever we went on a trip in a car, whether it was down the street for groceries or six hours away to my aunt’s house. I would hum along, watching the landscape pass me by as the soundtracks of my parents’ childhood warbled through the car speakers in words I didn’t understand. I was never a dab hand at Hindi, my chosen second language in school (and the less said about my response to my parents’ attempts to teach me Marathi and Kannada, the better). Now, though, I could comprehend the poetry behind the lyrics. I felt like I could see the singer of Thandi Hawa on his nighttime journey, ‘walking through the shadows of the trees like a star through the villages of the clouds’. Like the Elves tempted by the sea in Lord of the Rings, I was struck by a sudden wanderlust. I wanted to feel the cold breezes on my face, to ‘lay down on the mountains and rest my head on the sky’.
Little did I know how prophetic that wish would be.
Ft. cousin and dog.
And The Redwoods So Tall, In All Their Awe
The summer passed in a flash of lazy days, and soon it was time for me to pack up once again and head to campus for sophomore year. I’d been placed into the Outdoor House, a dorm themed around getting outside and having a good time (not necessarily in that order). To quote Red Riding Hood from Into the Woods, ‘it made me feel excited – well, excited and scared’. I loved nature, and I hadn’t really been able to get outdoors since leaving Bangalore, but what if the people here were all incredibly adventurous and left me behind? I’d already decided I needed to try and break out of my shell, but what would happen if I tried and got hurt? What if I didn’t fit in? (Again?)I needn’t have worried. The first person I met when I got to the building in the fall was one of my RAs for the year, Eric. He was from Colorado and an all-around outdoorsman, as expected, but he was also in Fleet Street, the comedy a cappella group. This was perfect! I’d already decided to audition for a cappella again – and maybe not lock myself into Indian music this time – and Eric might be able to point me in the right direction while I was at it. As part of my self-reinvention, I showed up to all the dorm events for the first couple of weeks – morning runs (physically exhausting from trying to keep up with everyone), dorm dinners (socially exhausting from trying to keep up with everyone), and Music Mondays (extremely rejuvenating, but everyone else was way better than me). In the middle of all of this, I got rejected once again from a cappella. I was sad about it, of course, but it was still significantly better than freshman year, since I had both friends to console me and no shortage of activities to take my mind off things.
In the middle of my sophomore fall, Outdoor House went on a trip to the other side of the Santa Cruz mountains. We visited a ranch, talked about regenerative agriculture, and then everyone split up into groups. Lacking the experience to join the surfers or the endurance to keep up with the runners, I went with Eric and one of my other dormmates on a hike – the longest outdoor activity I’d ever undertaken, nearly four hours. We crossed shady oak woodlands, passed through a golden meadow full of turkeys at the top of the hill, and turned to start heading downhill – and then we hit redwoods. Abruptly the temperature dropped. Spreading, feathery ferns extended friendly fronds onto the trail; rustling auburn needles coated the ground; and above it all, above the banana slugs and the newts and the humans on their trail, the ridge-barked columns of the trees rose into the heavens. There was no sound. The air was heavy and damp; shifting patches of sun warmed us as we passed through them, then the encroaching shade stole the heat right back. Even in what I now have the words to classify as a second-growth forest, the trees were gargantuan, and the few true elders of the wood we saw defied description. They were beyond my simple mortal comprehension, giant bulwarks extending up so far I couldn’t take them in all at once. Their trunks were so wide that all three of us together couldn’t wrap around their bases, their branches coming together in a vaulted green cathedral over my head. I suddenly remembered Thandi Hawa, the longing I’d felt when singing with my family. This was what I’d been looking for: to stand under layers of canopy surrounded by my elders, part of a system much bigger than myself. It was like I had never left the embrace of the rain trees. For one glorious instant, it didn’t matter that I had.
For one glorious instant, I was home.
Were We Somewhere In Between
Another great part of sophomore fall quarter was running into another person with a similar story to mine in Intro to Ecology. Born in Boston, raised in Mumbai, and studying biology, Aadya and I got off to a bit of a rocky start (it’s not my fault, I had no idea how to talk to people), but soon became good friends. One night over dinner, we were talking about the places we grew up, and as soon as I – predictably – started singing the praises of Laughing Waters and my rain tree guardians, Aadya dropped a bombshell on me that shut me up instantly. I had to go back to my room that night and look it up to make sure, and when I did, I received the shock of my life.
Rain tree. Known as Samanea saman in Linnaean Nomenclature. Known as seeras in Hindi, bagaya mara in Kannada, and shireesha in Sanskrit… and known as chankiri in Cambodia, bonara in Madagascar, ‘ohai in Hawai’i, and samán, cenízaro, cenicero, genízaro, and carreto, among others, in Central and South America – to which it is native.
That was a fun bomb to get dropped on me on a random Tuesday. The trees that had defined my perfect pocket of idyllic Indian wild were… I shuddered to even think the word… introduced? What did that mean for me, then?
Thinking about it, though, this put a lot of things in context. I needed my parents to translate both ways when we went to visit most of my family members (on both my mother’s and father’s side). I could never remember the words to the shlokas we recited and wearing a kurta made me itch and fidget. I could never interest myself in the Hindustani classical singing class my parents had put me in; hell, I tried to harmonise to the prayers we sang together – was this why? Was I too foreign of a species to naturalise myself in an Indian ecosystem? Now I thought back… a common refrain among my classmates in Bangalore around festival days was ‘I’m going to my native place for the holiday’, but I had never said that in my life and had never heard my parents say it either. I knew my father’s side of the family came from a small village called Belgaum in northern Karnataka, but we’d only ever visited there once at the end of a longer trip.At the same time, I didn’t feel like I could be a native of San Diego, or rather America, either. In some ways, it did feel right – there were people on campus who shared more of my interests (Hindustani music, Bollywood, Broadway, a cappella, nature, art) than anyone I’d met in India. However, the experiences of the people were too different from mine. All I heard from my dormmates of growing up in the US were stories of ‘ditch days’, ‘promposals’, and the freedom of having a car (to which I, as an environmentalist who’d never learned to drive, was of course staunchly opposed).Did I just… not have a native place? Did I fit nowhere, across two countries and two cultures?
I had no answers, and now I was in a fix. I couldn’t ask my parents, since they’d just start off again about how I was ignoring the culture I came from while themselves ignoring the question of which place I came from, my friends from high school just shrugged apologetically when I explained my dilemma, and I wasn’t close enough to anyone on campus to ask them. In response, therefore, I took the easy way out: I simply attempted to repress the entire notion of ‘belonging to a place’ in every facet of my life other than music (which I didn’t get to really express all that much anyway, since I had nowhere to sing without disturbing someone).
I stopped referring to anywhere as ‘home’. The place where I lived was ‘my dorm’, I went to San Diego to ‘visit my parents’ house’, and Bangalore was ‘the place where I grew up’. Time passed, the summer arrived, and I stayed on campus working on research. Not having classes or homework, I found myself with a preponderance of free time that I decided to spend familiarising myself with the lands around campus. I had been hiking in the hills with my dorm, but I wanted to explore them on my own, to make it to each trail under my own power. Like an addict searching for a fix, I found myself biking with screaming legs up Alpine Road, questing for a hiking trail I vaguely remembered from Outdoor House where we had gathered under an ancient oak whose boughs spread like a rain tree. I never found it, but the search itself ingrained in my memory an understanding of this little section of the Coast Range.
Avulekile Amasango (The Gates Of Heaven Are Open)
At last, fall quarter arrived, and I moved into my room for RA training. This was it. Like a successional forest, I had matured, and I was ready for the coming year. I had even accepted that I wouldn’t be singing with an a cappella group – I’d wanted to join up in the first place so I could find a community, and it had taken a little while, but I’d found that without a cappella. It had taken two years, but I’d finally put down my roots. I didn’t need any more; it was time now to deepen the ones I had. During the first week of the quarter, though, I was on my way to class when I passed by some friends of mine who were part of Stanford Talisman, a group I’d never given much attention. “You should try out,” they said, “it’d be great to hear your voice!” I laughed it off with a ‘maybe’ and went on my way. In the back of my mind, though, the thought remained, and so on a whim I signed up for an audition slot. Over the next week, I found my way to the aptly-named Harmony House, sung one of my brother’s favourite songs – Fly Me To the Moon – at my audition, was called back for the next round of auditions and given a folder of sheet music to learn, attended a practice session with the current members, and finally, a couple of days later, gone to the callback itself. The last of those had me weak in the knees – I had to sing new music with a bunch of strangers! It must be said, though, they were very friendly, and tried to put all the auditionees at ease.
The next morning, I woke up at 7:30, well before my alarm, with a feeling of anticipation. I opened my door, partly expecting to see a ‘Welcome to Talisman’ sign, and was only half-surprised to find nothing. Well, life went on. I brushed my teeth in the bathroom down the hall, returned to my room, and prepared myself to get some work started since I’d gotten up early anyway. Suddenly a horrible din arose in the hall outside my room. Someone – many someones – was banging on my door and yelling. Heart in my throat, I opened the door – and the noise transformed into music. I was standing in my pajamas staring at a crowd of people singing jen-jen-jen, you’re in Talisman. I stood there staring for a solid two minutes, trying and failing to keep a grin from spreading across my face, then closed the door at last when prompted by a friendly voice from somewhere in the crush of people to change so I could come with them. I threw on a sweatshirt and joined the group for an exhilarating two hours of eating, sneaking into other people’s dorms, and singing. (It wasn’t until twelve hours later that I thought to feel bad for all the freshmen the display had undoubtedly awakened.)
Being in Talisman was unlike anything I’d ever imagined. We learned harmonies and broke into sections to learn different parts, yes, but we also started every rehearsal by sharing ‘life moments’ and ended with a little dance. I also never realised just what went into the music that Talisman sang. Since 1990, the group had built up a repertoire with roots in musical traditions from around the world, and affording the songs we performed their due respect was paramount. Learning the notes was only one part of it – we spent hours just discussing the minutiae of pronouncing Spanish, Sanskrit, Zulu, or Swahili, and even longer teaching each other about the stories behind each song. We learned about freedom fighters in Nicaragua singing Sleep, my people, for your dreams are the future, about Bulgarian villagers asking a flute plays, mother, can I go see it?, about siblings in Equatorial Guinea calling out my sister, where are you? return to me. The songs and the emotions they contained were clear and simple, universal in a way I had never considered. At the end of our first show, I was surprised to see the directors call up all the ‘Talis-alumni’ in the seats to sing with us. The experience was sublime. Surrounded by incredible singers, with every voice lifted in song, I could feel the air vibrate with harmonies, thirty voices coming together to create something more than the sum of their parts. I felt whole. Better than whole – I was no longer alone. I was part of something much greater than myself, part of a family of musicians stretching back 30 years.
And the Trees Are Filled With Memories
It’s not a question anyone’s asked me yet – though some people in Talisman have come close – but if someone said to me one day “If you could be any plant, which plant would you be?” my answer would be both immediate and true. “I’d want to be a banyan tree,” I’d say, “that anchors itself to the earth so firmly that it grows roots from its branches, a tree that can live to be thousands of years old and grow till it’s a forest all on its own, supporting animals and birds and other plants.” I’d want to be a banyan, anchored in the land and constantly strengthening that connection, a tree whose spreading branches shelter deer and birds and seekers of enlightenment alike.
In pursuit of that ideal, I’ve been searching for some time now for a place where I can, like the banyan, put down roots. A tree’s roots are composed of reaching cells, armoured in cellulose and lignin; mine consist of more esoteric stuff – of memory and knowledge, of tall tales of animal encounters and paths walked a thousand times, of story and of song. With every waking moment, I extend my roots, searching for a place to belong.
The Great Banyan, the largest banyan tree in the world. Source: Wikipedia.
Over spring break of my junior year, Talisman went on our annual tour. This year, we were headed to Australia. I was excited! I’d never been before, I was going with the people who’d become some of my closest friends, and we were going to be learning about both First Nations Australian culture and the history of the country. The experience certainly did not disappoint – we took a tour and learned about the pre-colonial history of downtown Sydney, taught schoolchildren one of our songs, and I even got to go clubbing for the first time – but the real highlight was on the fourth day of the week. With nothing on our schedule, we drove out to go for a hike in Sydney’s Blue Mountains. The mountains were old, weathered and covered in temperate rainforests, and they were unlike anywhere I’d ever seen. We followed a narrow, branching trail down a hill until we reached our destination – Horseshoe Falls. It was enchanting. The trail passed under a low overhang, almost a cave, and when the ceiling raised up again we were behind the waterfall. From the cool, humid darkness of the overhang, we could see the sunlit green of the mossy rocks and smell humus and wet earth. The water itself rushed in thin streams to crash against a single giant boulder.
Abruptly, a memory bubbled up of reading Braiding Sweetgrass – Robin Wall Kimmerer’s description of returning from a class trip into the mountains, and the way her students all burst into, as Hadestown puts it, ‘a song of love from long ago’. I was filled with a sudden desire to sing, and only one tune came to mind. Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound… I was shocked to hear the lyric before I even opened my mouth. Two of my friends had both started singing, as if to themselves, the same words. Unable to restrain my grin, I added my voice to the song, and everyone else soon followed suit. Within minutes, we had dispersed around the waterfall, the nearby trees, and the sandstone boulders, all harmonising to the hymn that had been in Talisman’s repertoire nearly since its inception as the water and the rock rumbled a beat. ‘When we’ve been there ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun/ We’ve no less days to sing God’s grace than when we first begun’. Fifteen singers and a waterfall, making music together. Right then, it didn’t matter that I wasn’t in the place I grew up under the rain tree monarchs, didn’t matter that I wasn’t in the place I was carving out for myself under the redwoods. Here, in this rainforest four time zones away from anywhere I’d ever known, as ferns extended from the cliff overhead and trees I couldn’t name came together in a canopy fifty feet above the ground, I sang my love for the family I’d found – and for a moment, the world fell into tune. Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, but now am found, was blind but now I see.
I was home.
Musafir Hoon Yaaron (My friends, I am a traveller)
There’s a song my father enjoys that I particularly relate to.
To the tune of Mozart’s Symphony No. 40: Itna na mujhse tu pyaar badha, ki main ik baadal aawaara. Kaise kisi ka sahaara banoon, ki main khud beghar bechaara? ‘Don’t let your love for me increase any further, because I am a wandering cloud. How can I become a support for someone, when I myself am homeless, destitute?’
Maybe I’ll never really fit anywhere. Maybe I’ll always be ek aawaara – a wanderer, travelling aimless as a cloud. But that’s fine. Who’s to say that the cloud looming dark over Bangalore’s sky, firing off arrows to water the spreading rain trees, isn’t also the fog rolling in from the Pacific, nourishing the redwoods? A wanderer may not have a single home they feel connected to, no taproot to anchor them, but I, for one, will take the prop roots of the banyan any day.
My home is made of memory and knowledge, anchored in roads travelled and journeys taken over and over again, braided through with stories and song shared with the people I love. With every waking moment (and some sleeping ones) I deepen my roots, strengthening their connection to the places and the people with whom I belong. Have I finally anchored myself yet? No. Like the banyan, I have decades more of growing to do, branches and roots still to extend around the world. One thing is for sure, though. As long as I can come together with my loved ones, to lift my voice in song along with them, and to stand with them under the court of the trees, then wherever I am, I’m home.
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