I left India for Boston in December 2011, for a Master’s Degree in Computer Science at Northeastern University. I’d grown up there, worked there for two years before that — it wasn’t foreign to me. This year, we went back for my brother-in-law’s wedding in December. We expected to be there a few weeks. We ended up staying six months.
A wedding, then a waiting game
Our visa appointments were originally scheduled for December — timed around the trip, so we’d wrap up both at once. Then, on December 3rd, the State Department announced an expansion of social media vetting procedures for H-1B and H-4 visa applicants. Appointments across the board got pushed back as consulates adjusted to the new process — ours moved all the way to June. We eventually managed to get them moved up again, to early April, once additional slots opened. So a short trip home for a family wedding turned into an extended, mostly uncertain stretch of waiting to find out exactly when we’d actually be able to come back.
I’m not interested in relitigating the policy itself here. It was a change that happened while we were already mid-trip, and there wasn’t much to do but adjust and wait it out. What I didn’t expect was how much room that waiting would eventually leave for everything else.
A city that had moved on without me
Bangalore had changed more than I expected. I’d last been back three years earlier, and even in that short span, the traffic felt like it had roughly doubled. It was a small, constant reminder of how much keeps moving in a place even after you’ve built a life somewhere else — a little disorienting, honestly, in a way I hadn’t prepared for.
What hadn’t changed was how easy it was to fall back into old friendships. I reconnected with people I’d known since elementary school — kept in touch with loosely for fifteen years, but hadn’t sat across from in just as long. Six months turned out to be long enough to build something new, too, not just revisit something old. There’s a particular kind of relief in realizing a friendship can pick back up exactly where it left off, no matter how much the city around it has changed.
What the six months gave the kids
My son turned 2 while we were there, and he loved it — genuinely, unreservedly. Grandparents, extended family, a house full of people who doted on him constantly. He went to a local daycare for a couple of months, which gave him routine in between all the family time. Watching him form that kind of easy, everyday bond with his grandparents — not a once-a-year video call, but real familiarity — was one of the clearest “this is worth it” moments of the whole trip.
My daughter turned 8 during the trip, and her experience was the most complicated at first. She missed second grade back in the States, so we set her up with a private tutor for online classes to stay current with her actual curriculum — which worked academically, but wasn’t the same as a classroom. She missed her friends, and she missed recess — the specific, ordinary thing of running around a schoolyard with kids her age. That loss was real, and I don’t want to smooth over it.
But what she found instead surprised all of us. My mom made it something of a personal mission to teach her Kannada — before the trip, she could only understand a little of it. Two months later, she was actually speaking it. That’s remarkable on both ends: my mom’s patience, and my daughter’s willingness to just absorb a language by living inside it. She made new friends with the neighbors’ kids, and they’d go out and play most evenings — the yard, the parking lot, the quiet street my parents live on. Not a schoolyard, but its own kind of entertaining to her, in a way I don’t think she expected either. She came home having lost some things and gained one she couldn’t have gained any other way.
The people who made it feel easy
If the six months felt manageable rather than like an imposition, that wasn’t luck. It was my mom, my dad, my two aunts, and my sister, who all showed up for us every single day — not just logistically, but with a kind of steady emotional presence that made a long, uncertain stretch feel held instead of heavy. My mom’s patience teaching my daughter Kannada was one visible piece of it, but it was really the whole household — my dad included — absorbing four extra people into their daily rhythm without ever once making it feel like a burden. My wife got real, unhurried time with her own parents too, and with her brother’s new wife, who’d just joined the family after the wedding. None of that happens in the usual once-a-year, two-week visit. I don’t think I fully appreciated, until this trip, how much of a soft landing that kind of family support actually is.
Places I hadn’t seen in years — and some I’d never seen at all
I made a trip out to my father’s ancestral home, where my oldest aunt and her son still live. I hadn’t been back in fifteen years, and there was something grounding about walking through it again after that long — less nostalgia, more like touching a fixed point while everything else about the trip felt uncertain.
We did some real traveling as a family too. We saw the Adiyogi statue — over 40 feet tall, genuinely striking in person. We spent a weekend in Dandeli with my sister’s family and her kids, white-water rafting and filling the days with the kind of chaos that’s much better with cousins along for it. And for the first time in my life, I saw the Taj Mahal, and I visited Vrindavan, where Krishna is said to have grown up. Both had been on some mental list for years without ever quite happening — waiting turned out to be exactly what finally made room for them.
The food, everywhere
No part of this trip happened without incredible food, and it’s worth its own mention rather than a footnote. Home-cooked meals my mom made without a second thought, the spread at my in-laws’ whenever we visited, restaurant meals that reminded me exactly why six months isn’t nearly enough time to eat through everything a city like Bangalore has to offer. It’s a small thing to put next to visas and wedding photos and statues, but it wasn’t small at all while we were there — some of the best conversations of the whole trip happened over a meal, not despite one.
What I’d tell someone in the same spot
The uncertainty around the appointments never fully went away. It sat in the back of our minds the entire stretch — not loud, not consuming, but always there. We tried to stay in the present as much as we could. Make lemonade with the lemons we’d been dealt, as the saying goes — and most days, thanks in large part to the people around us, we managed it.
Back in Boston now, back to the usual rhythm. I don’t think about that stretch as “the trip that went wrong.” It started as a wedding, stayed longer than we expected, and — because of the people who made it easy — gave us far more than we walked in expecting.