Dealing with Homesickness: Mental Health Tips for Indians Abroad

It hits on Sunday evenings. I don't know why Sunday mainly, but ask any Indian living abroad and they'll tell you the same thing. The weekday has its structure — you wake up, go to work, come home, eat, sleep. Saturday you run errands, maybe see friends. But Sunday evening, around 5 or 6 PM, when the light starts changing and the week ahead looms and you've run out of things to distract yourself with — that's when it lands on your chest like a physical weight. Homesickness. The missing that doesn't have a cure because the thing you're missing isn't just a place, it's a time, it's a version of your life that keeps going without you.

I've been in the US for nearly seven years now, and I still get it. Not as often, not as sharp, but it's there. Like an old injury that aches when the weather changes. Some people claim they "got over" homesickness after the first year. I don't believe them. I think they just got better at not talking about it.

What I want to do in this piece is talk about it honestly. Not in a clinical, here-are-five-steps-to-wellness way. Not with cheerful advice that sounds like it was written by someone who's never felt the specific loneliness of being 8,000 miles from home on a random Tuesday when your mom calls and you can hear pressure cooker whistling in the background and the whole thing just breaks you. I want to talk about it the way you'd talk about it with a friend, sitting on the floor of your apartment at midnight, being real about it.

The Calls That Make It Worse

Let's start with the thing that's supposed to help: calling home. Everyone says "just call your parents regularly, it helps." And it does help, sort of. Hearing their voices, seeing their faces on video, catching up on the neighborhood gossip — who got married, who's building a new floor on their house, what your cousin did that's making everyone talk. It's a lifeline. I call my parents almost every day, usually during my morning commute, which is their evening time because of the time difference.

But here's what nobody tells you: the calls also make it worse. Because every call reminds you of what you're not part of. Your mom mentions she went to the doctor, and you find out two days after the fact. Your dad's having trouble with some government paperwork, and you can't help because you're literally on the other side of the planet. Your sister's kid took their first steps and you saw it on a 4-inch phone screen while standing in a Walmart parking lot. Your grandmother is getting older and frailer every time you see her on video, and you do the math on how many times you'll realistically see her in person before... before. That math is the worst part. You do it involuntarily and then you can't undo it.

The time zone thing adds a cruel layer. When you're free, they're sleeping. When they're free, you're working. There's maybe a two or three hour window where your schedules overlap, and if you miss it — because you had a meeting that ran late or you were stuck in traffic — that's it. No call today. Try again tomorrow. The distance isn't just physical. It's temporal. You're living in different times, literally, and the coordination required to have a simple phone call is a constant low-grade reminder that you're far away.

I'm not saying don't call. Call. Always call. But know that the calls might not fix the feeling. They might make it sharper. That's normal and it's not a sign that something is wrong with you.

The Specific Things You Miss

People think homesickness is about missing your family, and it is, but it's also about a thousand small things that you didn't know mattered until they were gone. I'm going to list some of mine, not because they're universal, but because maybe you'll see yours in here and feel less alone about it.

I miss the sound of my neighborhood in the morning. The pressure cooker whistles from different houses, slightly staggered. The man selling vegetables from a cart, shouting his prices. Temple bells at 6 AM. The thud of newspapers hitting doorsteps. My dog barking at the newspaper guy. All of that, blended together into a soundtrack that meant "home" at a frequency I only appreciated after it was gone. Mornings in America are quiet. Suburbs are absurdly, almost oppressively quiet. The silence used to make me anxious. Now I'm used to it, which is somehow sadder.

I miss auto-rickshaws. I know that's stupid. I know Uber is objectively more comfortable and safer and climate-controlled. But there's something about an auto ride — the wind in your face, the driver weaving through traffic with a confidence that borders on nihilism, haggling over ten rupees, the way you become part of the city for those fifteen minutes instead of sealed away from it. I took an auto last time I visited home and nearly cried from happiness, which was confusing for the driver.

I miss the food. Not Indian food — you can get Indian food anywhere in the US. I miss MY food. The specific taste of my mother's dal, which she makes slightly differently from anyone else's mother's dal, and I've tried to replicate it forty times and can't. The chai from the tapri near my old office that was objectively terrible — too much sugar, too boiled — but tasted like belonging. The street food from the specific chaat vendor near my college who put just the right amount of imli chutney. These aren't recipes. They're memories in food form, and you can't cook a memory.

I miss being unremarkable. In India, I was just a guy. Here, I'm "an Indian guy." There's always a slight otherness. People don't mean anything by it, usually, but the awareness that you're slightly different, slightly foreign, slightly not-from-here — it's exhausting in a way that accumulates over years. At home, you blend in. You belong without trying. You don't have to explain your name, your food, your accent, your traditions. You just exist. The luxury of just existing is something you only appreciate when you've lost it.

When It Gets Bad

There's a difference between regular homesickness — that Sunday evening ache — and the kind that becomes a problem. I want to talk about both, because I've experienced both.

Regular homesickness is manageable. It's a feeling that comes and goes. You miss home, you feel sad for a bit, you talk to someone or distract yourself or eat comfort food, and the feeling recedes. It's like waves — it washes over you and then pulls back. This is normal. This is what every immigrant experiences. It doesn't mean you made the wrong decision by moving. It just means you love the place and people you left behind, and that love doesn't turn off because you changed your zip code.

The other kind — the kind that becomes a problem — feels different. It's not waves. It's a weight. It doesn't recede. It's there when you wake up and when you go to sleep. It makes you withdraw. You stop going out, stop seeing friends, stop cooking, stop caring about work. You spend entire weekends in bed, not sleeping, just lying there with a heaviness that you can't explain. You start resenting being here. Every small frustration — a rude cashier, a confusing bill, an immigration form — feels like proof that you don't belong and never will. You think about going back constantly, obsessively, but you don't go back because you feel like that would be failing.

If that's you right now, I need to say something clearly: that's not just homesickness. That might be depression. And depression that's triggered or worsened by displacement, isolation, and cultural uprooting is way more common among immigrants than people realize, and seriously under-discussed, especially in the Indian community where mental health is still — we all know this — treated as something that happens to other people, something you should be able to handle with willpower and chai.

You can't handle clinical depression with willpower and chai. Please talk to someone. A therapist, a counselor, a doctor. If you're on a company health plan in the US, mental health coverage is usually included. Many companies offer EAP (Employee Assistance Programs) that give you free confidential counseling sessions. Use them. There's no shame in it. Moving to a different country is one of the most stressful things a human can do, and needing professional support to process that stress is rational, not weak.

Things That Actually Help (Not "Cures," Just... Help)

I've tried a lot of things over the years. Some worked. Some didn't. I'm going to share what worked for me, with the caveat that everyone's different and what helps me might not help you.

Routine helps. Not in a "optimize your morning routine" productivity-bro way. In a basic, grounding way. When everything feels unfamiliar and unstable, having a daily rhythm gives you something to hold onto. For me, it was: morning walk, call parents during commute, work, gym after work, cook dinner, call a friend or watch something, sleep. Nothing fancy. Just a structure that said "this is your day, this is your life here, it has a shape." The worst homesickness episodes I had were during periods when I had no routine — between jobs, or during COVID lockdown when every day was formless and empty.

Cooking helps. exactly, cooking Indian food. I know I just said you can't replicate your mom's dal, and you can't. But the act of cooking — the smell of tempering, cumin hitting hot oil, onions caramelizing, the steam from rice — engages your senses in a way that transports you, at least partially. When I'm chopping onions for a Sunday biryani (which I've gotten pretty good at, honestly), there's a part of my brain that thinks I'm in my parents' kitchen. The feeling fades as soon as I look up and see my American apartment instead of the kitchen I grew up in, but those brief moments of sensory transport are worth chasing.

Community helps, obviously. Finding other Indians, other immigrants, other people who understand the specific kind of loneliness you're feeling. But I want to be specific about this because "find your community" is easy to say and hard to do, especially if you're introverted or in a city without a large Indian population. Start online. Reddit's r/ABCDesis and r/IndiansinUS communities are good. WhatsApp groups for your college alumni in the US. Facebook groups for Indians in your city. Even just following Indian content creators who are abroad — there's something validating about seeing your experience reflected.

In-person community takes more effort but pays off more. If there's a temple nearby, go — even if you're not religious, the community aspect is there. Indian student associations if you're near a university. Professional groups like TiE or NetIP. Or just befriend the other Indian person at your office. You'll probably end up becoming close faster than you would in India, because shared displacement is a powerful bonding agent. Some of my deepest friendships were formed in the first year of being abroad, with people I had very little in common with other than "we're both Indian, we're both far from home, and we both need someone who gets it."

Exercise helps, and I resisted this one for years because it felt like the most annoyingly generic advice possible. "Have you tried going for a run?" Thanks, Karen, that's going to fix the void left by moving away from everyone I love. But seriously, it helps. Not because it fixes homesickness — nothing fixes homesickness — but because it gives your body something to do with the anxiety and restlessness that homesickness creates. I started going to the gym regularly in my second year, not because I wanted abs, but because I couldn't sleep and needed to tire myself out. It worked for the sleep and, unexpectedly, it helped with the general emotional heaviness too. Something about physical exhaustion makes emotional exhaustion more manageable.

Being honest about it helps. This one is underrated. In Indian culture, there's a tendency to perform okayness. "Everything is fine, job is going well, the weather is nice, I'm happy I'm here." We do this on calls with parents, with friends back home, with colleagues, with ourselves. And the performance is corrosive. It isolates you further because now you're homesick AND you can't talk about it AND you feel like everyone else is handling it fine so there must be something wrong with you.

There isn't something wrong with you. Everyone struggles with this. The people who look like they're thriving are also having Sunday evening moments in their apartments, missing their moms' cooking, wondering what they're doing here. When I started being honest about my homesickness — with friends, with my therapist, eventually even with my parents — the feeling didn't go away, but the loneliness around the feeling did. It's the difference between being sad in a room full of people who understand, and being sad alone. The sadness is the same, but the alone part changes everything.

Going Back (And the People Who Do)

I want to address something that doesn't get talked about enough: some people go back. Not because they failed. Not because they couldn't "handle it." Just because they weighed the trade-offs and decided that being close to family and living in a culture that feels like home was more important to them than whatever they were gaining by being abroad.

This is a valid choice. I need to say that clearly because the Indian abroad community can be weirdly judgmental about it. People who return get treated like they gave up, like they weren't tough enough, like they're settling. That's garbage. Making a deliberate choice about where and how you want to live your life isn't giving up. If anything, it takes more courage to go back than to stay, because staying is inertia. Going back means unwinding your whole life here — lease, job, visa, social circle — and rebuilding in India, which has also changed since you left and may not be the home you remember.

I have friends who went back and are happier. Not all of them. Some went back and found that India had changed or they had changed or both, and the home they were missing didn't exist anymore. That's its own kind of grief. But some went back and found exactly what they needed — family dinners every Sunday, festivals celebrated properly, the sense of belonging that comes from being in a place that feels like yours. One friend told me, "I'd rather be a well-paid engineer in Bangalore who's happy than a higher-paid engineer in the Bay Area who's lonely." I think about that a lot.

If you're thinking about going back, think seriously about it. Talk to people who've done it. Make the decision based on what you actually want from your life, not based on what other people will think or what "looks better" on your career trajectory. No salary compensates for sustained unhappiness. No visa status is worth your mental health. And there is absolutely no shame in deciding that the best place for you is the place you came from.

The Weirdness of Return Visits

Going home for a visit is complicated in ways I didn't anticipate. The first trip back, about eight months after I moved, I expected it to feel like coming home. Like putting on a favorite old t-shirt. Like relief.

It didn't. It felt strange. Familiar but slightly off, like a dream version of your life. The streets were the same but I noticed things I'd never noticed before — the noise, the traffic, the chaos. My parents were the same but older. My room was the same but it felt like visiting a museum of my previous self. I'd changed without realizing how much, and home hadn't changed to match the new me.

And then there's the re-entry problem. Going back to America after a visit home is — and I cannot emphasize this enough — the worst. It's worse than the original move. Because the original move has excitement and novelty mixed in with the fear. The return from a visit is pure loss. You've just spent two or three weeks being fully yourself, eating the right food, speaking the right language, existing in the right way, and now you're getting on a plane back to the place where you have to try. The flight back is twenty hours of dread. The first day back in your apartment is the loneliest day of the year, every year, without exception.

I don't have a fix for this. I just want you to know it happens. Plan for it. Don't schedule anything important the day after you return from India. Give yourself time to be sad about it. The sadness passes, usually within a week, and then you're back in your routine and it's manageable again. But that first week back is brutal, and knowing that it's coming and it's normal makes it slightly less awful.

The Things I've Learned About Myself

Here's what seven years of homesickness have taught me, for whatever that's worth.

I'm more Indian than I thought. Before I moved, I thought of myself as cosmopolitan, global, not tied to any particular identity. Turns out, that's easy to think when you're swimming in your own culture. Take me out of it and suddenly every Indian thing matters deeply — festivals I barely celebrated, foods I took for granted, values I thought I'd outgrown. Distance crystallized my Indianness in a way that proximity never could.

I'm more resilient than I thought. There were nights in the first year — actually dark nights — where I questioned everything. Why did I come here. What was the point. I should just go back. But I stayed. Not always for noble reasons. Sometimes just because the logistics of going back felt overwhelming. But I stayed, and I built a life, and I found joy in unexpected places, and I surprised myself with my own adaptability. That knowledge — that I can survive displacement and still find a way to be happy — is something nobody can take from me.

I've learned that you can belong to two places at once. This took years to understand. I used to think I had to choose — am I Indian or am I becoming American? Is this home or is that home? But it's not either/or. I belong to Hyderabad and I belong to Seattle. I'm shaped by my parents' kitchen and by my American apartment. I carry both places in me at all times, and neither one is more real or more mine than the other. This doesn't resolve the homesickness. But it makes it less like a wound and more like a dull ache from an old stretch — evidence that you've reached further than you thought you could.

And that's what I sit with, the part I haven't resolved and maybe never will: I don't know if I'll stay forever. I don't know if I'll go back. Every year the calculation shifts slightly. Some years the career growth and financial stability tip the scale toward staying. Some years a phone call with my aging father tips it toward going back. Some years I'm perfectly content here. Some years the Sunday evening weight gets heavy enough that I open Google Flights and look at tickets to Hyderabad and just... look at them.

I think most Indians abroad carry this unresolvedness. This permanent maybe. We're here but we might not be here. We've committed but we've left a door open. And that open door is both a comfort (I could go back anytime) and a torture (why am I not going back right now?). We live in the tension between those two feelings, and that tension, honestly, is just the shape of this life. The shape of being from one place and living in another. The shape of love stretched across an ocean.

If you're reading this on a Sunday evening and the weight is sitting on your chest and you're wondering if you're the only one — you're not. You're really, really not. And I don't have a fix for it. I wish I did. But I can tell you that the weight is evidence of something good. It means you loved somewhere enough to miss it this much. And that love, even when it hurts, even when it makes Sunday evenings unbearable, is worth carrying.