Families don't really break apart in a single moment, they just quietly stop fitting under one roof, notes Binu Alex.
Key Points
- Large joint families in Kerala have gradually disappeared as generations migrated overseas, leaving ancestral homes largely empty.
- Migration brings better opportunities but often creates emotional distance, weakening family bonds across multiple generations.
- Children raised abroad increasingly lose connections with their ancestral villages, relatives and shared cultural traditions.
- Grandparents once held extended families together, but their passing has accelerated the fragmentation of family networks.
When we were young, Kerala houses had no room to sleep in.
Cousins, uncles, aunties, everyone showed up for vacation. Eight or ten siblings per family, plus their children, plus their children's children.
It looked like a political rally every time we landed home.
That's all gone now. What's left are ghost houses.
I used to spend my Kerala trips going from one uncle's house to another. Maternal side, paternal side, didn't matter, there was always someone to visit.
Now they are all in London. Or the US. Or Australia, New Zealand, Germany, places I still can't spell properly. Permanently.
Their children have never met their cousins back home. They never will. They'll go to their graves not knowing people who share their blood.
Our kids are heading the same way.
The distance used to be a train journey. Now it's a distance you can't cover with any amount of trying.
My brother isn't an Indian citizen anymore.
Funny thing is, his only real ambition is to settle back in India. Even now. But only after he got his US passport first, just to be safe.
That's how it usually goes. The longing for home shows up right after you've made sure you don't need it.
His children have no such longing. They are American. They've never heard of the village their father or grandfather was born in.
Their only cousins are here in Kerala, and there's no rush on either side to meet.
That ship has sailed.
Most people leave chasing opportunity, and they leave excited. Slowly the excitement gets a shadow over it. Guilt.
They know life back home keeps happening without them. Weddings, funerals, ordinary Sunday lunches, aging parents. They read about it later, in a phone call.
Then comes the part nobody warns you about. Culture shock. Isolation.
In their quietest moments abroad, they miss something very specific, a sibling who just gets it without explanation.
Most of them end up like my brother. Not fully belonging to the place they left. Not fully rooted in the place they've landed.
Somewhere in between, permanently.
The second and third cousins drift off first. That chain breaks quietly, nobody announces it.
With one or two children per family now, the whole web of cousinhood has shrunk to almost nothing. Fewer aunts, fewer uncles, fewer cousins.
We grew up sharing courtyards and festival lunches with cousins like they were siblings.
Now the meetings aren't even yearly. They've been demoted to weddings. And funerals.
Grandparents were the glue in all this. They're the reason everyone showed up under one roof at all.
Once that generation is gone, the hub disappears, and every branch of the family floats off in its own direction.
These days people choose their friends over their cousins. Chosen family beats blood relatives who share nothing but a surname now.
I think about this migration and I think about myself. What if I had gone too.
I'd have done fine, probably. But your roots don't travel with you. Your people, your friends, that whole invisible web that holds you up, stays behind.
You can build a new one elsewhere. But you can't smell the earth anywhere else.
A week outside India and I start missing it.
The longest I've ever been away was 23 days. Ten years ago. Roaming around the US, alone most of the time, in cars and trains and airports.
Those 23 days taught me something I didn't expect. I couldn't settle anywhere else now. Not at this stage of my life.
Then I think of so many parents. The ones who migrate late, to be near their children. Not by their choice.
When Home Never Leaves You
Completely uprooted. No one to share the small griefs with, losing your own street, your own small joys, your own sense of place. Dropped into a country where you're nobody, and your children are barely anybody either.
Never coming back.
For the last three years I've been travelling across Kerala trying to understand this properly. It's turned into a documentary series, almost done now.
Talked to thirty, forty families. Heard the same ache in different accents.
Scripting is done. Editing is left. You'll hear more about it soon.
It's a painful story, this one. About leaving a home that never quite leaves you.
Families don't really break apart in a single moment, they just quietly stop fitting under one roof.
Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff
