I love both of my parents equally, so my special affection has always been reserved for my grandmother—the only grandparent I have and will ever have. While I have spoken to her through WhatsApp, I haven’t seen her in-person in over five years, as she lives in India and I live in the US. Whenever I have gotten to spend time with her, it was because she flew from India to stay with my parents and I; I’ve never visited her in her home, nor have I even visited India yet. When we discuss her next potential visit over the phone, she questions whether she should visit me again or I should visit her home, which she refers to simply as “home.”

As all of my family members are from India, I, by inheritance, also consider India “home,” in a sense. However, I have only lived in the US and never even been to India, so I view America as my home. I am the only member of my family that was born outside of India, so I am alone in this internal identity crisis. Is America my home, or is it India? The reality is far more complex than simply saying, “Both.”

This memory from a summer day in 2020, a time during lockdown when I had too much free time on my hands, stuck with me to this day because of the sharp pang of longing I felt for my nani and the flurry of questions I asked my 12-year-old self about my identity. As soon as I read the prompt and some sample pieces, I immediately thought of my relationship with my grandmother, which is best characterized by this “tiny moment.”

Initially, I struggled to encapsulate the essence of this moment in just 100 words—I was constantly pressing command+shift+c, which kept revealing a word count of 101, or 102, or 103. I was so close yet so far from achieving this goal for quite a while, until I was eventually able to remove parts that didn’t contribute to my depiction of an internal identity conflict sparked by missing my grandmother. Overall, writing this piece helped me gain perspective on my relationship with my heritage and bridge the 8,000-mile gap between my American and Indian identities.