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I've spent 36 of my 40 years in India. But from 1997 to 2001, plus months at a stretch during a spell of home schooling, I lived in Indonesia. I studied at an international school in Bandung. My friends were a couple of Indians, a Moroccan-Brit, a half Indonesian-American and a Chinese-American.
We played basketball. Weekends were cricket with Australians and Brits at what was called the West Java Wanderers Cricket Club. The atmosphere was very relaxed: inappropriate humour, barbecues, beer and lots of swearing. For a 13-year-old Tamil kid, it was an education. I was there every weekend for more than a year. Looking back, that exposure at that age changed me far more than I realised. One of the funniest moments of my life is still watching an Aussie nearly get hit by a cricket ball and tell the bowler, "Missed my jewels, mate."
Tennis lessons were with Indonesian kids. Movies were with that medley school lot. South Koreans bullied me for not knowing the difference between North and South Korea (in retrospect, I get it). One of my favourite teachers is still Ibu Ketut, a Balinese biology teacher. She's second only to Lakshmi, an English teacher who moved to Australia from Madras.
The ways people spoke English, the movies I watched, the music I listened to, the books I read, the conversations I had, the freedoms I was given, how normal it was to talk about sex, how aggressive people were on the field, the wildly different food and sensibilities of the homes I stayed over at. It all left a mark.
Credit to my parents for not locking me in. When I told them at 13 that the god and prayer thing made no sense and gave me no comfort, they took it on the chin and let me be. We spoke English at home. And were encouraged to write clearly and improve our diction. It made it much easier to get along with people from other cultures.
It's easy to think four or five years can't change a person much. But it was far more profound than even I gave it credit for until recently. A lot of my own culture stopped making sense or started to seem silly and insular. Attitudes to women, sex and religion. How we speak to each other. A certain candour. Even simple things like how you fix and drive your car, talk to restaurant staff, or clean your home.
Moving back at 14 was a struggle. It was a completely different milieu. Without a couple of friends with similar sensibilities, I'm not sure I'd have adjusted. That was 25 years ago. But a stint abroad really does make you a very different person. Without a cultural anchor, and the habits a homogeneous milieu normalises, you're forced to find meaning and belonging elsewhere. Work, hobbies, art.
And there's really no going back.