Everyone remembers the first time they felt truly out of place. For me, it was the
September I turned fourteen, standing in a high school cafeteria three thousand miles
from the only home I had ever known, holding a tray of food I had no intention of eating.
My family had moved from Mumbai to Toronto six weeks earlier, and I had convinced
myself that fitting in was only a matter of time — that the knot in my stomach would
loosen once I learned my classmates' names and the rules of the games they played at
recess. What I did not anticipate was that the hardest part of starting over would not be
the unfamiliar accents or the cold, but the quiet loss of the person I had been at home.
That year taught me that identity is not something we carry with us intact, but something
we rebuild piece by piece in every new place we call home.
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