Where Are You From? (And What We're Really Asking Our Children to Carry)

On raising a child between two cultures, and the weight of everything unspoken.

My son came home from school last year and asked me: “Amma, where am I from?”

He’d been asked that question ; you know the one — and he’d said “London,” because that’s where he’s been for several years. And the other child had said, “No, but where are you really from?”

I remember that question. I remember being seven and not knowing how to answer it. I remember being seventeen and being angry about it. I remember being twenty-seven and having a rehearsed answer that satisfied no one, least of all me. I’m from Chennai, but hometown is a little village near Kumbakonam. My husband is also from Chennai, but his hometown is Madurai. We had moved to Bahrain when our son was 4 months old, then Doha, then London.

Now I’m watching my son figure it out. And I still don’t know what to tell him.

The truth is, I’m asking him to carry something complicated.

I’m asking him to feel British; because he is. To feel at home here;because this is his home.

But I’m also asking him to hold onto something else.

A language he didn’t grow up immersed in. A music tradition that doesn’t show up on his school curriculum. A set of stories and values and rituals that I absorbed without thinking, but that he’ll have to choose to keep.

That’s a lot to ask of a child.

I feel the guilt constantly.

The guilt when I let things slide ; when we skip Tamil practice because we’re tired, when I don’t correct his pronunciation, when I choose the easy path because the day was hard enough already.

The guilt when I don’t let things slide ; when I insist on something that feels forced, when I see his eyes roll, when I wonder if I’m making him resent the very culture I’m trying to protect.

There’s no winning. Just a series of small choices, every day, and the hope that enough of them add up to something.

But then there are the other moments.

The moment he recognises a Tamil song and lights up. The moment he watches Chennai Super Kings and shouts out, but they don’t give us much of a chance anyways.

The moment he corrects my pronunciation of a sloka he’s been learning. The moment he tells his friend, casually, “In my culture, we do it like this” — and I realise something has stuck.

Those moments keep me going.

I don’t have this figured out. I don’t think any of us do.

But I think there’s power in saying it out loud. In admitting that this is hard. In finding other parents who are carrying the same weight and saying: I see you. Me too.

That’s why I’m writing this.

I’m going to keep writing about this — the language, the music, the identity, the impossible balancing act of raising children between worlds. The stuff we talk about in group chats but rarely say publicly.

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