The ‘desi’ NRI parent…

For most NRI (non-resident Indian) parents, the experience of raising a child in foreign lands is unique, filled with contradictions, and cultural assimilation challenges. Dhanya Parthasarathy, a freelance writer and mother of Anand, who relocated from Chennai to Malaysia, shares her take on the experience of an NRI parent.

The frustration and exasperation of raising a child in a foreign country

• No one can pronounce your child’s name. They try only to fail. Over and over. “How do you say it — ‘Adnan,’ is it? Anann? Oh, you mean Annan!”
And I thought Anand was simple enough.
• You insist on using cloth nappies most of the time and getting your child fully toilet-trained before age three. And you are accused of being liar of the year or supermom nominee.
• Your child sings “Twinkle Twinkle,” but he is singing it in Mandarin! Hooray for international preschools! After all, English is also not our mother tongue.
• Your child can identify an auto-pay station before you can.
• Your child thinks grandparents come only on Skype.
• He hasn’t seen cows, buffaloes, and crows in a really, really long time. Not to mention autorickshaws.
• You turn into a typical high society lady and grumble endlessly when you visit India and read a note that the electricity will shutdown for two hours, once every four months for maintenance work.
Two hours!! Without electricity! How primitive!
Why can’t maintenance be completed in 15 minutes?
• Your 45-day-old is startled when a car honks. When I first came to Singapore, I couldn’t sleep because it was too quiet!
• Even your toddler says, “Don’t say rupee any more amma. We don’t use rupees here.”
• It could be Diwali, Navarathri, Buddha Poornima or any other festival, and you wouldn’t know it when you stepped out of your apartment.
• You bring your newborn back from the hospital to a home without grandparents. A home that doesn’t smell of a seven-course feast complete with payasam and vada.
• You child has a school bag that he can pull on wheels. He’s not ‘shouldering’ the burden of education like his peers in India.
• But on the first day of school, his teacher can’t figure out what he’s saying when he’s sobbing over and over saying: “Amma yeppo varuvaa?” When will mom come to pick me up?