Permanent resident or permanent tourist?
I came to Australia in 2009 — fourteen years ago. Four years later I became a Permanent Resident, and eleven years later, a citizen by conferral. Yet, today in 2023, I remain as a permanent tourist in this strange land.
As a new immigrant, back in 2009, I felt a heightened sense of awareness to what was around me. I embraced the sights, sounds, food and drinks, songs, and arts. It all felt very new, delectable, and exciting. The notion of self was left behind. It lay dormant. The ego and the pride and the sense of belonging to where I came from hardly surfaced. All there was to the new life was a clear picture being stared at with gaping eyes and a keen sense of smell and hearing.
Australia’s immigration procedures, although comprehensively thorough and detailed even back in 2013, didn’t bother me. I could produce all that was needed to qualify and to apply for a permanent residency. I wasn’t attached to the outcome. I knew I liked the country despite the occasional bouts of homesickness. If I didn’t make it, I was ready to accept to go back. But then, I became a permanent resident in 2013.
With passage of time, it became apparent that my adopted country’s social, moral, and cultural values were cut from a different cloth. I am a citizen now, but I feel I live a half-life, or a double-agent. The sense of alienness leaves the door with me every day I step out. Not because of any unfair experiences — Australia or Australians have never meted out any unfair treatment to me on account of my colour or religion, surely not anything I have become aware of or got affected by. But it is not easy to fit in.
I have donned a masque — of an artificial self, of made-up countenance and demeanour and restrained opinions and reactions only to be accepted in mainstream society. I don’t have radical ways, but I also find it unnatural and unbecoming of myself to do what is commonly done by those who were born here — no matter what colour of skin. At the end of the day, when I let my guard down, I see myself in the mirror — the same forgotten self who had set foot in this foreign land in 2009.
Australia starts early — offices, cafes, shops all open early by say 6 a.m. or latest by 8 a.m. My eyes are barely awake then and yet I find myself on the commute to work. I struggle to espouse that morning wave of enthusiasm and energy. During the lunch hour — I like to sit and eat my lunch with no interruptions from work, it is a social hour for me — I see most people walking their lunches and shoving a sandwich pulled out from cling wrap into their mouths almost as if lunch was the interruption in what was otherwise an exciting day at work. Retail, pharmacies, restaurants, and most establishments shut early too with the exception of pubs — I am not a late hour drinker. My energy rises with the setting sun which means I start feeling better by late afternoon hours and at my most sociable in the evening — just when everyone else stops for the day.
After all the initial years of observing, orienting, adapting, and acting, the mind and body has worn out. Oscar Wilde’s ‘Be yourself, everyone else is taken’ seems to be most profound fact yet an impossible challenge to live. The mind wants to become itself.
The life laid out above is what one is left with when that piece of paper granting you the Permanent Residency or Citizenship is forgotten inside your closet. At the end of the day, the charm of the new land withers away; you start missing your own people whom you have left behind. The inner voice asks, ‘Where is home, then?’
This piece was submitted to Migrant Matters for publication by guest author Suhir Iyer. A migrant to Australia, Mr. Iyer shares his thoughts regularly through his Medium account. You can reach him on Instagram at @sudhiriyer, Facebook at @sudhir.b.iyer, or LinkedIn at @sudhiriyer.
