We Came Back to India After 20 Years. We Didn’t Know We Were Coming Home.

In 2024, we came back to India after roughly twenty years away.

We thought we were visiting.

Looking at these little clips now, they feel different.

The crowded streets of Ludhiana. Sitting with family. The slow crawl toward Chaura Bazaar. Food arriving at the table. Rubz beside me. None of it felt like footage from the beginning of something.

But maybe it was.

Twenty years is a long time to be away

There is a strange thing that happens when you return to a place that still feels like yours, even after life has carried you somewhere else for a very long time.

Some things are instantly familiar. The sounds. The traffic. The way a market seems to have its own pulse. The conversations happening around you. The food. Family.

Other things remind you how much time has passed.

We weren’t trying to turn the trip into some grand statement about identity or belonging. We were simply there, together, taking in Ludhiana and recording bits and pieces as we usually do.

Then came Chaura Bazaar

One of those pieces was the two of us heading toward Chaura Bazaar.

There was nothing particularly cinematic about sitting in traffic on the way into a busy market. Cars squeezed together. People everywhere. Shopfronts, signs, movement and noise competing for attention.

And yet that is exactly why the footage means something to us now.

It wasn’t staged. It wasn’t a travel commercial. It was just a day in Ludhiana.

Rubz and I were there after two decades away, moving through a place that felt simultaneously familiar and new.

We didn’t know what came next

At the time, we weren’t filming an origin story.

We didn’t know that a couple of years later we would be preparing to leave Florida and make Punjab home. We didn’t know that conversations about a different pace of life would become plans, paperwork, packing lists, business ideas and a very real question of how to move three dogs halfway around the world.

We certainly weren’t walking around Chaura Bazaar thinking, “Remember this shot. It’ll make sense later.”

Life is rarely that considerate.

Meaning usually arrives afterward.

The footage changed without changing

The video itself is still the same little montage we made in 2024. Family. Streets. Us. Ludhiana. A meal. A moment.

What changed is where we’re standing when we watch it.

Back then, India was somewhere we had returned to.

Now we’re preparing for India to become the place we return home to.

That makes even the imperfect little phone clips feel valuable. They caught something before we knew it needed to be caught.

Maybe this is where the India Journey really begins

We’ve been thinking of our move as a story that begins in 2027.

But perhaps that’s too neat.

Maybe the story looks more like this:

2024: we returned.
2026: we decided.
2027: we move.

There will be plenty to document between now and then — the practical things, the emotional things, the ridiculous things and eventually the ordinary days of actually living there.

But this little montage from Ludhiana reminds us why we started Desi Bits And Pieces in the first place.

You don’t always know which moments matter while you’re living them.

So sometimes you just keep the bits and pieces.

And later, they become the story.