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Upon immigrating to the United States, I was plucked from my narrow but warmly confined scope of the world extending from my street to my school and back. At the age of five, I found myself in a foreign place surrounded by people who did not look like me and spoke an unintelligible language. Coen and Penn (2013) share a quotation by an immigrant colleague that resonates with me: “I attended my first day of kindergarten as if it were a visit to a new country” (p. 1203).
Upon reflection, I suppose my response to this was to quickly work toward reestablishing that sense of familiarity I so missed. This meant unzipping myself out of the suit of my Indian identity as soon as I stepped outside my home and frantically stitching together a new, American suit that would allow me to seamlessly blend in. Or perhaps this American suit was forcefully thrust toward me by this newly engulfing sense of anxiety and alien-ness with the simple instruction, “put it on.”
Regardless of the origin of this suit, I wore it. I wore it proudly and disparaged the other costume that I begrudgingly put on whenever I reentered my Indian home — the home that viscerally reminded me that I was different, with its sensory assault of intense smells and sounds that I became ashamed of and ridiculed. I attempted to toss aside anything that tied me to my Indian identity and instead quickly adopted a new American identity, going from “Sahil (sa-HILL)” to “Sahil (sa-HEEL).” I now wonder how my parents viewed my undergoing this process. Did they have regrets about immigrating to this place that caused me to strip myself of anything tying me to what was left behind?
It is only in recent years that I have begun frantically searching for those parts of me that I stripped off and cast aside, retracing my steps but returning empty-handed. Perhaps those things cannot be retrieved as they once were, but instead a new identity must be developed, one that integrates the complex feelings of loss,
longing, and regret t