Finding a measure of home

I am a nomad. Born of a father who "escaped" to Bombay from his home in the heart of Kerala at the age of 16 and a mother who herself was reared in Bombay, far from the place of her birth in the hinterlands of Karnataka. I was raised in the United Arab Emirates: an ocean away from Bombay, where I was born (itself a place far removed in space and life-ways from the points to which I trace my cultural and linguistic ancestry). The United Arab Emirates was a land full of nomads like me, and the country was understood by most who had travelled there to be but a caravanserai in the grander enterprise of making a living and a life. And though home was past some distant shore to many of us--whether Cairo, Khartoum, Manila or Bombay--we all found in that little oasis called Dubai some measure of home. We made of those who lived and travelled with us friends and family, created and recreated the familiar amidst the foreign and dug our heels into the drifting sands of that desert port.
And just as I was metamorphosing into some semblance of a grown up, I found myself again in an alien land. And here in the United States too, I made for myself a home, where for the past nine years I have woven strands of my past lives and my present world into a complex and ever-changing cultural fabric.
Now, for the fourth time in my life I am transported--but this time I am back in that elusive Leviathan of a home called India. And I find that in these 23 years since I left its shores, I have arrived back with many more homes than I left with, with many oases that I dwell on fondly and yearn to return to. India is of course a beast of many colours and aspects, and Delhi, where I am at present, is not much like Bombay or Bangalore, where I have lived before. But I know that here too I will find bits of the familiar in places I least expect to, and I will come to find comfort in things newly encountered. And so it is my task once more to find a measure of home.