My great grandfather moved to a different part of Asia and never went back. My grandfather moved elsewhere and never went back. My mother moved to another continent and then later, with my father, to a third, where I partially grew up. And I moved to yet another continent (with another emigrée), speaking a language that, like my mother, I had learned after growing up.

Yet today I spoke English with a stranger, a woman born to Indian immigrants and she spoke with the same hand gestures I do.