After a lifetime across continents, one Indian woman’s journey reveals that belonging is not about leaving one home behind — it’s about discovering where all your identities can finally coexist.
Being born in India meant being born into fullness — into a world where color, ritual, and memory layered themselves into one’s identity. And yet, something in me wanted more. I wanted to see the world beyond borders.
From namaste to the Stars and Stripes: author Sumi Seissinger embodies the dual citizenship of the immigrant heart.
And so my journey began. What followed was not an escape but an accumulation. I left India for Dubai. Then I came to America, followed by a return to India, where I met my husband, a German. Together, we lived in Germany and China before eventually returning to the United States. Through it all, I kept my Indian passport. Having married a German, another passport — one more widely accepted around the world — was available to me. But every time I considered it, I returned to the same recognition: when I looked in the mirror, I saw an Indian woman. And so I remained one.
Meanwhile, every place I lived entered me quietly but permanently. New languages settled into my mouth, and belonging loosened its rigid definition. Each country came with its own lessons. Dubai taught me that comfort and belonging are not the same thing. Germany lives in me through my mother-in-law’s kitchen: the slow richness of Jäger sauce and long walks through vineyards where conversations stretched as far as the landscape itself. China lives in me through the turning of a lazy Susan, chopsticks crossing and recrossing, and strangers becoming familiar through the simple act of sharing food.
Yet India never left me
It remained in my cooking, and in the sudden am- bushes of memory: a jar of lime pickle on a grocery shelf tightening something in my throat; the sight of murukku in plastic packets bearing the words “Taste of Home”; tears arriving without warning.
This is what a life lived across countries does. You do not become someone new. You become many things at once.
The Geography of Belonging
And then there are the people.
I met her on a film set: my German friend, blonde and blue-eyed, the physical opposite of everything I am. Yet we immediately recognized something familiar in each other. Years later, she remains one of the people who knows me best — a reminder that you can be anywhere in the world and still find the person who fits.
When we returned to the United States from China, we traded the familiar cosmopolitanism of the Northeast for the Deep South. American friends wondered aloud what a brown woman like me would find in Georgia, my new place.
I found friendly neighbors — deeply Southern by birth or by choice — who arrived with food, warmth, and an openness that undid every assumption I had carried to their door. They welcomed me fully. And once again, I learned that generosity and kindness belong to no single geography.
And through all of it, there was my cousin — my Indian lens, my sister from another mother. Her path to America was more direct than mine. She came as a student and stayed, absorbing the slings and arrows of immigration when acceptance was rarer, and the price of belonging was higher. She carried a different map of this country than I did. We exchanged stories the way travelers compare routes, each of us tracing a different road toward the same quiet conclusion.
Living Between Here and There
There are moments when the pull of the past strikes with urgency, bringing along a yearning for a familial kitchen, language, and a version of myself. And then there is the pull of family, which often means listening across time zones and continents for the call that may come in the night. Your mother is in the hospital. Your father has passed. Your brother is unwell. Distance does not dull these things. It sharpens them. You live with the knowledge that you are always one flight away from needing to return.
Meanwhile, the dance of belonging continues. In some ways, it is easier in America. I have lived in countries that knew exactly what they were — places where the story was already written and belonging required fitting inside it. America felt different: unfinished, openly and almost defiantly so. Its contradictions were visible, its arguments ongoing, its future unwritten. There was space in that. Space to arrive as you were and become something more.
I could have become an American citizen decades earlier. The forms were there. The pathway was clear. But citizenship, to me, was never administrative. It was a vow. And vows require certainty. That certainty arrived gradually.
One Thanksgiving, in the aisles of a grocery store and around a crowded dinner table, longing slowly gave way to familiarity. Family and chosen family gathered together. Friendships crossed every border I had once believed mattered. A quiet realization emerged: America was no longer simply where I lived. It was where my life was happening.
Then came a Fourth of July. Heat rose from the pavement. Children ran through the grass. Flags lifted in the summer wind. Red, white, and blue stretched beneath a sky that seemed to belong to everyone. I was singing the national anthem when it happened. Not a revelation. Not a decision. A recognition. The question I had carried for decades simply wasn’t there anymore. I was no longer measuring one country against another. No longer wondering whether I belonged. No longer standing with one foot in and one foot out.
I was home.
Sumi Seissinger is a writer, actor, journalist, and columnist whose career has spanned four continents. She has served as area manager of Khaleej Times and editor-in-chief of Dalian Today. Her forthcoming novel, We the Unafraid, explores courage in the age of extremism.