I. The Honest Sentence

They came here for the money.

And they’ll tell you that’s exactly why they came – without an inkling of shame or civic embarrassment. They want to build parallel societies that look exactly like Madurai, and will not integrate into the western countries that welcomed them and built the property their Lexus SUV sits on.

Everything else – the better life, the children’s future, the courage of the journey – is the costume the money wears. We are not here to strip the costume out of cruelty. We are here because the costume has been mistaken for the thing underneath it for long enough.

They come. They extract what’s on offer: income, passport, security, the infrastructure of a country someone else built. They use the schools, the hospitals, the legal system, and the roads. They settle. They compound.

And then they go home.

Not geographically. Extraction requires proximity.

They go home in every other sense:

  • The kitchen;
  • The matrimony market;
  • The community hall;
  • The calendar of auspicious and inauspicious days; and
  • The circuit of temples that are now a long-haul flight away and no less mandatory for the distance.

They recreate Madurai in their terraced houses in London and their mock Tudors in Essex. Using mortgages the host country’s banking system provided them. And they seal it against the place where they live ontologically.

Their children – us, born here, carrying their names and their faces and none of their nostalgia – are never consulted on this arrangement.

We are never asked what kind of impact this would have on us – because we were never the point.

Because we are nothing more than costumes to these people.

II. What the Suitcase Contained

A tradition embedded in living soil has natural correctives. The grandmother who quietly ignores the rule. The uncle who married wrong and nobody discusses it anymore. The slow erosion of dogma under the pressure of lived reality.

Diaspora removes the soil.

What arrives in the new country is not the tradition. It is the performance of the tradition, cut from the ecosystem that would have continued to shape it. Stripped of context it cannot evolve. It calcifies. And the enforcement of the calcified performance falls on the children.

We grew up watching adults maintain, with considerable energy and zero introspection, a set of practices they cannot explain and rules they cannot justify (without physical and emotional violence for daring to ask).

Not tradition. Archive.

The distinction matters because a tradition asks something of you – it points somewhere, it has direction. An archive asks only that the form be maintained. That the performance continue. That the children know their lines.

We knew our lines.

We were never told what the play was for.

III. The Child as Return on Investment

We were not raised. We were optimised.

The distinction is not subtle. A raised child is a person being prepared for their own life. An optimised child is an asset being prepared for its function in someone else’s story.

The function was specific: justify the migration.

They left. The leaving required justification. The justification required proof. The proof was us. A doctor. An engineer. A spouse from the right background, married at the right age, in a ceremony the aunties could approve. Credentials followed by credentials followed by a wedding. This was the return on investment. This was what the leaving was for.

This is why stability – that word, deployed always at maximum damage – means nothing about whether we were capable of love or ready for genuine commitment. It means:

Are you yet presentable enough for the performance I have been orchestrating since the H-1B petition was filed?

The wedding is never ours. We are the occasion. They are the event.

We understood this before we had language for it. Not through analysis – through the body, through a thousand small moments that each said the same thing:

You exist to complete the picture we are trying to paint for others.

You are the evidence, not the point.

Here is what this produces:

It produces a child who is very good at performing.

Who learns early that performance is what is rewarded, and who is not stupid, and who therefore performs.

The obedient child at the community gathering.

The grateful son at the temple.

The promising student at the parents’ evening.

Fluent in a register that has nothing to do with who they actually are, speaking it so smoothly that for years they cannot always locate where the performance ends and the person begins.

Underneath the performance, accumulating without a name, is the specific anger of someone who has been used.

Not loved. Used. Instrumentalised. Managed in the way you manage something threatening to fail at its function. Disciplined not for growth but for the protection of the image. Told to be stable not because their flourishing matters but because instability is inconvenient for the story.

They are not in contact with what they have done. This is not a mitigating circumstance; it is the precise mechanism by which a damage that is never examined becomes a damage that is reliably reproduced.

We are the reproduction. We are done pretending we are the original.

IV. Discipline Without Doctrine

They kept the rules. They discarded the reasons.

This is the inevitable result of transplanting performance without transmission. You can enforce a rule indefinitely without understanding it. The enforcement is easier without the understanding – because understanding introduces doubt, and doubt introduces the possibility that the rule no longer serves anyone, and that possibility is existentially threatening to an ego and identity built entirely on form.

So the form is maintained – through violence, physical and emotional.

Sandhyavandanam in a hotel room in the middle of Times Square when we’re all supposed to be on vacation. Tap water in a silver cup with a silver spoon. A teenager on five hours of sleep kneeling on a hotel towel because the performance does not pause for exhaustion, or context, or the question of whether this is doing anything for anyone including God. As if God is sitting up there, maintaining a sandhyavandanam ledger.

Newsflash: He does not give a shit.

God was not asked. God is never asked.

The ritual is not for God. It is for the parent’s anxiety – the specific anxiety of someone who transported an identity across a significant distance and must keep performing it to confirm it still exists. Performed devotion as proof of residence.

A doctrine transmitted through coercion produces compliance in the first generation and contempt in the second. We are the second generation. Our compliance is on the record.

What remains is not devotion.

It is forensic contempt.

V. The Temple Circuit

Consider the economics.

The flights. The accommodation. The driver-for-hire with the rusty old Innova that should’ve been scrapped 10 years ago.

The archanais, priced per deity, accumulating across the circuit. The dakshina. The prasad. The audience assembled and updated. The energy of children who have crossed time zones and are now being moved between sanctums at throughput pace, because the circuit must be completed and the circuit does not care if anyone is present enough to receive anything.

Add it up.

At the end of it, what has been received?

The tradition has an answer. The same answer delivered by every genuine voice across fifteen centuries of its living expression:

Nothing here that couldn’t have been found closer.

The divine does not require a long-haul flight and a 400km round trip in a beat-up Innova to go look at some rocks. The divine requires only that you pay attention to what is actually in front of you.

We came home from the circuit.

Outside the house, something was waiting.

Almost as if He arranged it, right on cue at the end of the trip.

VI. Devaki

She was on the street next to our front gates.

Ribs showing. Teats heavy – recently nursing, her body running two deficits simultaneously. Paint matted into her coat from a nearby construction project. The eyes of an animal that has not encountered a human who meant it no harm in longer than it can calculate.

She was Devi. The tradition that had just been honoured across the entire circuit says this without qualification: Devi is present in all living beings. No asterisk. No exception carved out for the ones who are inconvenient or unbeautiful or unable to thank you. And for better or for worse – yes – this also includes the cretins we are discussing here. Devi is in them too.

A child of this community said: we should help her. Food, water, basic acknowledgement that she existed and that her suffering was not someone else’s problem.

The response, from the generation that had just completed the circuit – archanais paid, dakshina given, temple tickboxes complete – was a sneer.

“What are you going to do, save all the dogs?”

There it is.

The temples? Yes.

The circuit? Yes.

The correct clothing and the correct timing and the correct deities approached in the correct sequence at considerable expense, with the children conscripted as supporting cast throughout?

Yes to all the above.

The divine, on the pavement outside the house, malnourished, paint in her fur, starving alongside her 4 puppies?

No.

Too inconvenient. No sanctum. No audience to perform for. No community approval available for the transaction. The transaction had already been completed at the temples, in their mind.

So we decided, that generation can go fuck itself.

We named the dog Devaki. We bought her two bowls (for food and water) and a bag of puppy-grade food following the pet store’s guidance that puppy food allows for easier nursing.

People were enlisted to help us continue their care after we flew home. The people who our community would normally look down upon as “low caste”, were exactly the ones who aligned with the mission and donated their time and efforts.

Her condition improved drastically. The puppies looked healthier. That is what an encounter with God looks like. Not this performative ritual bullshit, participating in frenzied stampedes to go stare at a rock for three seconds.

It was the only genuine act of the entire trip, and it was instructive:

An animal shelter is much more of a temple than our own “temples” will ever be.

The Red Cross and RSPCA are more sacred than the ritual-performing cowards following and enforcing shastram.

The “low-caste” people aligned with Devi are infinitely more sacred than our “high-caste” community with its ritual compliance.

A living tradition recognises Devi on a pavement without needing a circuit to warm up first. The tradition has been saying this – through Kabir, through Guru Nanak, through every genuine voice it ever produced – without interruption for fifteen centuries. The diaspora hears it at every temple on the circuit and in the very mantras they chant.

They hear it; they just don’t care.

Madurai is not a city.

It is the choice to maintain the performance at the expense of the living thing in front of you. To spend a week on the circuit and sneer at Devi on your own doorstep. To build the apparatus so completely – the mortgage, the community hall, the WhatsApp group, the children who know their lines – that the actual tradition, the one that was always pointing at the pavement and not the sanctum, becomes invisible.

You can build it anywhere. It travels well. It requires no soil.

Devaki was outside.

She is always outside.

But you couldn’t give a shit, could you? Because there isn’t a shastrigal or audience waiting to clap.

TridentAtlas