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at the other kids, rocking back and forth. Even when they returned his smile, came forward, and sought to include him in their gangs, he would run away, run to me, maintain his distance. At a very early age, too early an age, he became conscious of his difference.
    I took Gautama to his first day of preschool, at the Y on 14th Street. All the two-year-olds were speaking English except my son. We had raised him speaking Gujarati at home. The teachers led the kids through a drill, telling them when to raise their hands; they sang songs. My son could not understand. I sat with him, feeling miserable. The kids in our building said about him, “He can’t talk.” He looked up at them hopefully, but they didn’t invite him to play. When he sat in the garden downstairs, eating his khichdi—which the British had changed into kedgeree—from his little bowl, the girl living across the hall screwed up her face. “Eeeuww.” This was what colonialism, fifty years after the Empire ended, had done to my son: It had rendered our language unspeakable, our food inedible.
    Then our second son, Akash, was born. More and more we thought: We have to take the children home. Our children must have the experienceof living in a country where everyone looks just like them. Where we can go into a restaurant in a small town in the country and all heads will not automatically turn to stare at us. In India they can grow up with confidence; they will get a sense of their unique selves, which will be welcome in the larger self. Home is not a consumable entity. You can’t go home by eating certain foods, by replaying its films on your television screen. At some point you have to live there again. The dream of return had to be brought into the daylight sooner or later. But to what place would we return, my Bombay, Sunita’s Madras, or someplace cheap and lovely like the Himalayas? In 1996, I had been in Bombay for two months, to write an article about the Hindu—Muslim riots. It was the longest span of time I had spent in the city since leaving, and it felt hospitable to me. Sunita could go back to school, for a master’s degree. There are many Bombays; through the writing of a book, I wanted to find mine.
    J UST BEFORE I LEFT New York, I walked into a magazine store where I had often browsed in the afternoon. I had never before spoken to the cashier. I picked up a magazine, took it to the counter, and realized I had forgotten my wallet. I set it down and told the cashier I would be right back. “You can give me the money later,” he said, waving me on. “I know you.”
    I walked out of the store, exhilarated. In these last five years, I had made the East Village my home. Home is where your credit is good at the corner store. New York, under Mayor Giuliani, had experienced a rebirth. We left a safe city, where you could come out of a club at 4 a.m. and still find people on the street, couples, lovers. A city that worked, where the garbage got picked up, the fallen snow was cleared within hours, the traffic moved predictably, and subway trains were frequent and air-conditioned. There were parties at every corner.
    But each time we have gotten comfortable in a place we have moved. Each time we have gotten to know a group of people, we have needed to go somewhere else to find people we didn’t know. We were now going to India, not as tourists and not to visit relatives, either. Other than my uncle in Bombay and my aunts in Ahmadabad and Kanpur, I have almost no relatives left in India. They’ve all moved—to America, to England. India was the new world for me. And Bombay was landfall.

    C OMING BACK from a trip to Elephanta Island, and seeing the wedding cake of the old Taj Hotel, the imitation skyscraper of the new one, and the Gateway of India in front of them, I feel the slightest souvenir of the quickening of the heart that European travelers to India must have felt, through all those long centuries. After several months at sea, after rounding