I left India to live. I returned to belong

I left India because I wanted to live.

That sentence may sound dramatic to younger readers today, but for many of us who grew up queer in the India of the 1970s and 1980s, it feels less like drama and more like documentation.

I was three when I knew I was different.

Not gay. Not queer. Not any of the words that would come later.

Just different.

Different in the way I spoke.

Different in the way I moved.

Different in the things that made me laugh.

Different in the boys I noticed.

Different in the dreams I carried.

The world noticed too.

Long before I understood myself, others had already decided what was wrong with me.

So when I left India at 20 and landed in New York, I arrived carrying equal amounts of hope and shame.

Hope that I might finally become myself.

Shame because I had been taught that myself was something to apologise for.

For 30 years, New York became my karmabhoomi.

It gave me language.

It gave me visibility.

It gave me permission.

It gave me the extraordinary gift of anonymity. In New York, nobody cared who your grandfather was, what caste you belonged to, which school you attended, or whether your family knew the right people. The city was too busy surviving itself to care about your pedigree.

It cared about your work.

Your talent.

Your hustle.

Your willingness to show up.

For a young gay Indian man arriving from Delhi, that freedom felt revolutionary.

New York did not always love me.

America did not always welcome me.

I was called names.

I was stereotyped.

I was exoticised.

I was reduced to caricatures and assumptions.

But even in those moments, there remained a larger promise beneath the prejudice: that I had the right to exist.

The right to speak.

The right to love.

The right to become.

And so I built a life there.

A beautiful life.

A complicated life.

A life filled with friendships, failures, victories, restaurants, books, heartbreaks, reinventions, and endless possibility.

Even now, if someone told me there was a flight leaving tonight, part of me would want to board it immediately.

Every day, some corner of my heart misses New York.

The smell of the subway after rain.

The impossible skyline.

The energy that crackles through the city at all hours.

The sense that reinvention is always one block away.

There is nothing quite like it.

Nothing.

Which is precisely why I do not allow myself to dwell on it too much.

If I begin romanticising what I left behind, I risk missing what is unfolding before me now.

And what is unfolding before me now is India.

Not the India I left.

The India I returned to.

A country still imperfect.

Still struggling.

Still wrestling with itself.

But also a country that has changed in ways my younger self could never have imagined.

When I was growing up, there were no mirrors.

No role models.

No visible queer lives.

No stories that suggested someone like me could grow up, fall in love, build a career, write books, host television shows, become successful, become whole.

Today I meet young queer Indians who speak openly about their identities.

I meet parents trying, however imperfectly, to understand.

I meet businesses creating spaces for inclusion.

I meet artists, activists, entrepreneurs, teachers, and students who refuse to shrink themselves to fit someone else’s expectations.

Perhaps the clearest measure of change arrived not at a Pride march, a literary festival, or a television studio, but at my own front door.

When I returned to India after years away, I did not return triumphant. I returned exhausted. Bruised by life. Carrying more uncertainty than confidence. I had come home to heal.

As I walked in, Khaggi, who has long managed our household and kept all of us organised with patience and affection, greeted me warmly. Then, almost immediately, he asked, “Charlie bhaiya kab aa rahe hain?”

When is Charlie coming?

There was no hesitation in his voice. No awkwardness. No calculation. No politics. The question was as natural as asking whether a brother, cousin, or old friend would be joining us for dinner.

For many years, Charlie had been part of my life. Khaggi knew that. More importantly, he accepted it. Not because someone had explained inclusion to him. Not because he had attended a workshop or read a manifesto. But because love, once witnessed honestly, often requires no translation.

Standing there, I felt something shift inside me. The country I had once left because I feared being seen was now asking, quite matter-of-factly, when the person I loved would be coming home.

That small question carried within it an enormous answer.

Perhaps this is how change really happens. Not all at once in courtrooms or parliaments, but quietly, person by person, family by family, conversation by conversation, until one day what once seemed impossible becomes ordinary.

I have seen that same change in my mother, for whom my being gay has become a non-issue, a simple fact no more remarkable than the colour of my eyes. I have seen it at literary festivals where I have been introduced not with whispered discomfort but with openness and warmth. I have seen it in old classmates who now ask difficult questions not to judge, but to understand.

One friend recently asked me, with genuine curiosity, whether life had been difficult growing up gay, whether we had been treated differently, whether the bullying and loneliness had been real. The question moved me because it would have been unimaginable years ago. We were no longer debating whether queer lives existed. We were discussing how to make them kinder.

The journey is far from complete.

But the journey is happening.

And that matters.

Because Pride has never really been about parades.

Pride is about possibility.

It is the moment a child realises they are not alone.

It is the moment a parent chooses curiosity over condemnation.

It is the moment a society decides that difference is not a defect.

That is Pride.

And yet, as this Pride Month comes to an end, I find myself thinking about another kind of freedom.

The freedom to belong.

The freedom to be complicated.

The freedom to love a place without pretending it is perfect.

For years, I believed belonging was a destination.

Find the right city.

Find the right relationship.

Find the right community.

Find the right country.

Then you will belong.

Age has taught me otherwise.

Belonging is not geography.

It is relationship.

You belong where people make space for your truth.

You belong where your full self can arrive.

You belong where your laughter does not need translation.

You belong where your silence is understood.

Increasingly, I find that belonging here.

In Mumbai.

In Delhi.

At dinner tables where friends insist I stay longer.

In homes where spare bedrooms become mine.

In conversations that stretch late into the night.

In readers who stop me to discuss a column.

In strangers who become friends.

In a country that still frustrates me daily and yet somehow keeps inviting me deeper into itself.

I never expected that.

I certainly never planned it.

Life rarely asks our permission before teaching us something important.

The truth is that Pride and patriotism are often presented as opposing forces.

As if being queer somehow makes you less connected to your country.

As if loving differently means belonging less deeply.

My experience has been exactly the opposite.

The more fully I accepted myself, the more fully I could embrace where I came from.

Not blindly.

Not uncritically.

But honestly.

Love without honesty is marketing.

Love with honesty is commitment.

I love India enough to want more from her.

More compassion.

More inclusion.

More curiosity.

More kindness.

More space for everyone.

Not despite being queer.

Because I am queer.

Because I know what exclusion feels like.

Because I know what loneliness costs.

Because I know how transformative acceptance can be.

Perhaps that is why I find myself increasingly grateful to be here at this moment.

Especially when I look across the ocean.

The America that once inspired so much of the world now often seems trapped in an exhausting performance of outrage.

Political leaders speak with cruelty where wisdom should reside.

Fear is marketed as patriotism.

Division masquerades as strength.

The noise is relentless.

Watching it from afar, I sometimes feel relieved not to be living inside that storm.

Had I remained there, I suspect I would spend half my days shouting at television screens and the other half mourning what has been lost.

Instead, I find myself here.

Healing.

Writing.

Cooking.

Listening.

Learning how to belong again.

Learning that home is not always where you began.

Nor is it always where you spent the longest time.

Sometimes home is the place that welcomes the person you became.

And that, perhaps, is what Pride has always been teaching us.

Not that we must choose between who we are and where we come from.

But that the deepest freedom arrives when we no longer have to choose at all.

This June, as Pride Month draws to a close, I find myself grateful.

Grateful for New York.

Grateful for India.

Grateful for the boy who survived.

Grateful for the man who returned.

Grateful for every person who made room for me when I could not yet make room for myself.

The rainbow, after all, is not a symbol of sameness.

It is a symbol of coexistence.

Many colours.

One sky.

Many stories.

One humanity.

Many journeys.

One longing.

To be seen.

To be safe.

To belong.

And perhaps that is the real work of Pride.

Not simply celebrating who we are.

But building a world where no one has to leave home to become themselves.

And if we can do that—here, in India, now—then perhaps the next generation will inherit something far more meaningful than tolerance.

They will inherit belonging.

And that is a freedom worth celebrating every month of the year.