I come home from India to the United States every year now to visit my dad. There he is in all his rakish charm, looking more Irish every time I see him: the sparkling blue eyes, the bright-white hair, the elfish smile. And he’s not the only one I get to see. I have an amazing family in America—our two older children, my sisters and brothers, my sisters- and brothers-in-law, a host of friends.

I love these visits.

I slip back into my life here as if I had never left. There are the odd quirks I have picked up unknowingly in my years in India (the head wag, the singsong, the obsession with ironing clothes, the easy assumptions about boundaries), which occasionally emerge as a reminder of my other life. But mostly I make the transition like a fish released into a deep lake. I drink coffee while I drive, and I drive carefully. I use the ATMs. I listen to NPR and the classical station. My brother-in-law and my nephews sing Irish folk songs, and I sing along. I cook the way I used to: quick, easy meals, which are prepared in no time. When the meals are over, we clean up after ourselves. I have wine every evening in front of the fire. I borrow clothes from my sisters and my daughter. I trade stories, recycle old jokes, and share memories. I am home.

And yet I’m not. My home is also thousands of miles away in a house my husband and I built. I speak another language there, Hindi, and I speak in another way: I use the familiar and occasionally the honorific. I touch my elders’ feet. I drive like a maniac. I manage a house full of servants (and we are not rich) and guests who stay for weeks (though our house is not big). I wear different clothes, eat different food, and walk through the world with an entirely different frame of mind.

I’m happy in both places, but each makes me feel alive in different ways, compelled by different forces, and answerable to different expectations. This having two lives, two homes, is one way to live. But the separations and the constant partings, the longings and the divided loyalties, the inability to share some piece of what is central to my life with people who are crucial to it—these things take their toll. In both worlds, on both sides. Like everyone else, I’m a pilgrim wherever I go. My childhood is forever off-limits to adult friends in India, who cannot imagine its wonders and necessities, its Christmas music, the uncle who called me Yo Yo, another uncle who taught me to drive and would shoot me in the foot if he saw how I drive in India, and the sisters who hold my heart and soul in their hands and who would give their lives to protect me.

As for my adult life in India, a life of fewer comforts and deeper joys, of picnics on the roof and two bottles of Thums Up poured into three glasses, a life with a community that springs into action at every moment of crisis or celebration—this life is forever out of reach to my loved ones in America, who want the best for me and worry about seat belts, hot showers, health care, and the lack thereof.

And then there’s my life as a bridge, as the one who takes it here and delivers it there, who sets out West to forage for supplies—coffee, a laptop, Pampers, funds and equipment for my school—and who waits in India to welcome visiting nieces and nephews taking a year off from school, and sends them back a little wiser about their mothers and fathers and cousins who grew up in India but are now in America.

At the heart of it all is our daughter Moy Moy, the one with special needs, who started here and will always be here, and whose sweet little life is upheld by all that is great about India (nurture, loyalty, tradition, simplicity) and sustained by all that is great about America (innovation, creativity, systems, wealth). It is mostly Moy Moy who keeps me in India, and who keeps everyone else coming back to see just how she does it. She is the link between the past and the future, between the children who have moved on and the parents who have remained. Creating the family that now encircles and supports her, in India and in America, is our greatest achievement and our dearest joy.