​My mother said that when we were infants people often asked whether my brother and I were twins. I found it hard to believe. He was taller, better looking and fairer, the last quite important in India.
 
I would be tongue-tied and even failed to say my name when my parents introduced me to their ever-flowing stream of friends. In contrast, my brother would announce his name clearly, with a confident smile, and add that he was a student in the school next door.  I remember guests would turn to my parents and say how bright their eldest son was. Then, realizing that I was within earshot, added, “Your other son is charming too.” 

​We were close, always together. Our parents took great pains to treat us equally. If he got a new shirt, I got one too. On his birthday, I too received gifts, and he on mine. We were avid readers and always asking for books. Father never chanced buying a book for one without buying another for the ogling brother.
 
We were avid sportsmen too. Whatever he played, cricket, soccer, badminton or table tennis, I wanted to play too. He excelled in table tennis; I was relieved to find that I was adept in badminton. We loved cricket and wanted to be like Don Bradman or Mushtaq Ali, having been taken by father to see the latter in Eden Gardens. I wasn’t a great batsman, but bowled competently and fielded diligently. But I noticed our friends always chose my brother to be the captain of a side, never me.
 
This was understandable, because he was highly sociable. He talked, he laughed, he could easily start a conversation with a total stranger. I could at best join a group and  be congenial.
 
I could see how smart he was. Though Bengali was our mother tongue, we learned to speak English early, because several of our parents’ colleagues were English and we played with their children on social occasions. We had barely learned English before my brother started reading Aldous Huxley and Bertrand Russell. He talked excitedly about the ideas he had picked up from new authors. I listened open-mouthed and tried hard to keep up. I admired his acumen, particularly as I saw nothing comparable in other young people I met, and I felt like a plodder next to him.

He could be shockingly direct and rebellious. Father saw him reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover and wondered whether he should be reading such a book. My brother wondered in response whether our father had read the book and, if he had, understood it. I overheard my parents discussing his obstreperousness for days.
 
My brother had a simple solution. He went to visit my aunt in a distant town and decided not to come back. He stayed with her, went to a different college and attended a different course.

​​He did not realize the magnitude of the shock he had administered to our parents. And to me. We were such a close-knit family and so constantly together that his absence felt like an enormous physical void. Mother’s eyes seemed to mist every time she looked at the vacant chair at our dinner table.
 
Our paths diverged from that point. To our surprise, he forged a successful academic track, gained a doctorate, worked at a clinical institute, and eventually joined the country’s most creative social science think tank. He pioneered research in new areas and wrote a series of seminal books. One thing never changed. He remained steadfastly his own person. He stayed disorganized and idiosyncratic, resolutely original and invariably controversial.

​I worked for industry and government. I didn’t care for status. I didn’t even care much for immediate results. But I had fun analyzing how things worked or didn’t work. Pompously, we called it strategy.  I found my plodding approach a help: People are always throwing facts at you – and often views pretending to be facts – and you need a way to get past that and unmask what lies behind. I learned to respect tradition, but also be ready to try the untried.
 
The curious truth is I feel I have become more articulate and less asocial, while my brother has turned more inward. Even curiouser is the truth that, though we have lived in different continents for thirty years, our links were never stronger.
 
I still admire him, but I flatter myself I understand him better. I know he understands me better than anyone else. We could indeed be twins.

​There was a time I traveled often. I still travel, but off and on. Earlier, I traveled regularly, frequently, and far and wide. Aircrafts felt like taxis and airports were very nearly home. I saw wonderful things: the placid Periyar lake in India’s Kerala, the glorious sunset on St Mark’s square in Venice, the old opera house near Lake Constance in Germany.
 
I remember I used to prefer the window seat, for it offered a better view after take-off and before landing. I knew the exact aircraft I was flying; I tried their drink and sampled their food; I talked to the airline staff. That tells you how much I cared for taking in every bit of my travel experience.

​And there was a lot of experience, varied and even wild, to take in.
 
A tall woman from Boston with a becoming page-boy haircut sat next to me and devoted herself to a book on Tibetan Buddhism by Chogyam Trumpa. After two vodka-on-rocks she confided to me that she was the Panchen Lama, on her way to meet the Dalai Lama. When I expressed surprise that we were headed to Tokyo, and not Delhi, where the Buddhist leader resided in Dharamsala, she whispered, over a third vodka, that I didn’t understand that location did not matter in spiritual matters. The conversation went downhill as she ordered the fourth.
 
The spirited young Indian entrepreneur, 31, from Dubai was memorable despite our briefest encounter. He barely took his seat before he drew the attention of the nearest flight attendant and demanded two whiskies. At first she said he would have to wait for mealtime, then placated him and brought two small bottles, urging him to tarry until the takeoff. He guzzled both instantly, iceless and waterless, then became more importunate in demanding replenishment. Assuming a fellow Indian to be a sympathetic listener, he told me he knew how to deal with unobliging females and strode truculently to the attendants’ corner with a can-do face. Next there was a scuffle, burly guards appeared and the enterprising entrepreneur was summarily escorted out.
 
Then there was the sedate young couple from Amsterdam who took the next two seats and started smooching barely after the plane was airborne. The dinner service interrupted them, but they resumed as soon as it was over. As the lights dimmed, he went down on her; she dutifully returned the favor and then climbed on him and continued a long, energetic trajectory to mutual satisfaction. My presence within inches was no bar, and my sleeping pills were unavailing against their gentle shrieks.

​Perhaps there is something in the experience of being up in the air, far from land and water, away from things and people they know, that make people act so different in a plane. They feel detached not only from their accustomed world, but also its conventions and restraints. They talk freely with the stranger next to them, in the seat or the washroom line. They strike friendships, even romances. I have seen reclusive colleagues meet the love of their life on an aircraft and adventurous friends make passes at comely flight attendants.
 
My Reuters friend, Jagjit, while trying to unload his heavy photographic equipment from an overhead bin, fell clumsily but with uncanny accuracy in the lap of an orthopedic surgeon in an aisle seat. He broke his wrist. She not only treated him during the flight and later in town, but continues to take care of him now as his wife.

​Personally I have met an extraordinary set of fellow passengers. Besides innumerable tourists and business travelers I have encountered: a doll designer, who assesses international trends and designs new dolls, that are then manufactured in millions in Hong Kong; an armament salesman, who would not name his illustrious clients but named scores of cities in obscure islands I have never heard of; and a smell specialist, who advises major food companies on chemical smells that are artfully blended with a variety of food, to make them appetizing to consumers before even they have tasted it. Several of them still remain my friends, even when I have scant interest in their products.
 
I don’t travel as much these days. When I do, I pay much less attention to the plane and its cuisine, even its new design. But I never fail to enjoy the growing variety of people who now grace the seat next to me and often amaze me with the curious and outrageous things they do, freed from earth-bound links.

​What does it mean to visit your country of birth after thirty-five years?
 
First, curiosity. What does it look like now? Of course, every place you visit has changed; most places have changed radically. The roads are better, the buildings taller, there are new flyovers and subways. Admittedly the roads are not cleaner, the buildings defy both taste and norms, and there are stories of subway accidents and flyover crashes. No matter. The changes are signs of some vibrancy, an undeniable groping for a better life, a matter of interest and curiosity.

​Second, empathy. Life in general is far harder in Kolkata or Konnagar than in Washington. Life in the US is impersonal, but organized and convenient. Banking or traveling, paying bills or renovating your home does not means waiting, standing in line, pleasing petty bosses or greasing greedy palms. So you come and see friends, colleagues and relatives, people no worse than you, suffering slings and arrows that you have long buried in the past, evokes a strange mixture of concern and empathy.
 
And yet, thirdly, there is a curious sense of comfort. The city, despite all the changes, feels like a familiar groove, where you can once again breathe in a familiar air, polluted and lung-busting to be sure, but also warm, friendly, heart-lifting. You take a turn, the locale seems vaguely familiar, you look for the old café, before you realize you are mistaken, you are in effect lost, and yet you don’t feel uncomfortable, for you feel somehow in accustomed terrain, like an old shoe or tea in a cracked but cherished cup.

​Then there is the reckoning, with wreckage and ruination. Two of the houses I had lived in Kolkata exist, one inhabited and the other deserted, but both look worse than ruined. They appear like ghost houses. Two others have been demolished mercilessly, replaced by giant ill-designed structures that seem fit habitat only for purblind creatures. I am told those are high-priced apartment buildings, but to me these look like an unkind shelter for wounded spirits.
 
Contrasting with those ravages is the pleasure of encountering what hasn’t changed. After savoring haute cuisine in fifty countries, I still exult over what you find street vendors purvey on Mumbai streets and tiny restaurants serve on Kolkata’s winding lanes. The joy of rediscovering what I had enjoyed and loved as a callow youth is immeasurable. Music is now eminently portable, yet I have to come to India to realize what vast treasures remain beyond my reach without a visit to my pristine land.

​None of this comes anywhere near the heart of the matter. The biggest reason you come back is because of the people. People you know, people you have known and people you expect to know. The faces of my friends are no longer wrinkle-free, some move slowly and some don’t move at all. Their minds sometimes wander, their memories falter, their interests diverge from mine, but they are still my friends. I am glad they smile as they receive me, and accept my angularities as readily as they did earlier. I value their friendship and cherish their affection.

​Not just my friends. Why do even the strangers, in this land from which I am now decidedly estranged, act so kind, helpful and generous? Why do their words evince such warmth when I ask a question or need some help? Why do they walk hundreds of yards to show me the turn I must take to reach some obscure destination that has significance only for a man in exile? What is that ineffable link that connects me to this land, these people, this whole culture and will not snap?
 
That is what I feel: a man in exile, not really estranged, not even – as the official term goes – ‘expatriated,’ but just someone who has been abroad for a long time, but has now taken the time to come home.