There is no one here to do this with me.

That is the sentence I come back to every time I set up the Diwali diyas alone, every time I try to teach my daughter a festival song I only half-remember, every time I cook something from memory and am not entirely sure I have got it right because there is no one in my kitchen to correct me.

In India, culture is not something you have to try to pass down. It passes itself. It is in the air, in the neighborhood, in the grandparents who live nearby, in the school where children celebrate the same festivals, in the vegetables vendor who comes every morning speaking your language, in a hundred daily things that do not feel like culture because they simply feel like life.

Here, it is just me. Me and my stubbornness and my slightly uneven rangoli and my chai that nobody taught my children to drink except me.

And somehow — somehow — it is working.

The Weight of Being the Only One

I want to acknowledge this honestly before I get to the hopeful part, because I think it deserves acknowledgment.

There is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from being the sole carrier of something. Not just the doing of it — the remembering of it. Remembering that Navratri is coming and we need to find a garba somewhere and the kids need outfits and the prasad needs to be made. Remembering to speak Hindi even when English is easier. Remembering to tell the stories, explain the significance, make the food, mark the day — when no one around you are marking it and the world outside your front door has no idea it is even happening.

In India, the culture would carry itself. Here, I am the one carrying it. Every single day. Alone.

On the tired days, that weight feels enormous.

"In India, the culture would carry itself. Here, I am the one carrying it. Every day. Alone."

What I Do When I Cannot Remember

My memory of certain things is imperfect. I left India in my late twenties. Some of the prayers, some of the rituals, some of the exact way things were done — I have the shape of them but not always the detail.

I call my mother. I call her mid-cooking, mid-puja, mid-festival preparation. She talks me through it. She corrects me gently. She sometimes laughs at what I have improvised and tells me the right way.

YouTube has saved me more than I would like to admit. There are entire channels dedicated to traditional recipes and festival rituals and the correct words to prayers I should know by heart they are learning these things alongside me, which is not how I imagined passing down culture but turns out to be surprisingly beautiful.

I have also made peace with doing things imperfectly. An imperfect diya is still a diya. A slightly wrong puja is still a puja. The intention travels even when the execution is approximate. My children will not know the difference — and by the time they are old enough to know the difference, I will have practiced enough to get it right.

The Things That Stick Without Trying

Here is what I have noticed: children absorb more than you think, even without a formal effort.

My son knows the word for almost every vegetable in Hindi because I have always named them in both languages while cooking. I did not plan this. I was just talking while cooking, the way I always do, and it went in.

My daughter knows the smell of Agar Batti means something sacred is happening. She knows to be quiet and respectful when the diya is lit. She learned this by watching, not by being taught.

Both of them know that when Nani calls everything stops. That her voice on the phone is important. That the people in India are not abstract relatives but real people who love them specifically, who know their names and their habits and ask about them by name.

This is culture too. The small, unremarkable, daily things. They are building something in my children that I cannot fully see yet but that I trust is there.

Building a Community When There Is None

The honest answer to raising kids with Indian culture alone is - find other people who are also doing it alone and do it together.

I found them slowly. The desi families at school. The WhatsApp group for Indian parents in the area. The people at the garba who I talked to for ten minutes and then saw again at Holi and then again at a potluck and who are now real friends.

We do not all do things the same way. Some families are more religious, some less. Some speak Hindi, some Tamil, some Gujarati. Some celebrate everything, some celebrate selectively. But we share the same underlying thing: we are all carrying a culture in a country that does not share it, and we are all doing it without the support system we would have had back home.

There is solidarity in that. On Diwali I do not celebrate alone — I celebrate with three other families and our children run between houses and the lane outside smells faintly of agarbatti and someone always brings too much mithai and it is not the colony I grew up in but it is something. It is ours.

What I Tell Myself on the Hard Days

On the days when the effort feels too large — when I am setting up for a festival I am too tired to celebrate, when I realise I do not know the full lyrics to the song I am trying to teach, when I feel the absence of everyone who should be here helping me do this — I tell myself something simple.

I am not trying to give my children India. I am trying to give them a thread. A thin, continuous thread that runs from my grandmother's kitchen to my mother's kitchen to mine and will one day run to theirs.

The thread does not have to be perfect. It just has to not break.

I am holding it. That is enough.

What My Children Will Carry

My children will not have my childhood. They will not have the colony, the summers at Nani's house, the festivals in a neighborhood where every house was celebrating, the language all around them all the time.

But they will have this: a mother who made the effort. Who lit the diya even when she was tired. Who told the stories even when she only half-remembered them. Who cooked the food and played the music and called the grandparents and celebrated every festival in a New Jersey townhouse with too many fairy lights and slightly uneven rangoli and the absolute best chai for miles.

They will carry the smell of that kitchen. The feeling of those evenings. The knowledge that where they come from matters and is beautiful and is worth keeping alive.

That is what I am giving them. Not all of India. Just enough India to know it is theirs.

And one day, when they are the ones doing this alone — in whatever city, in whatever country, in whatever kitchen — they will know exactly what to do.

Because they watched me do it.

thecozydesimom.com | Culture & Chai