An H1B worker gets to meet family

I have a niece and a nephew named Kabir and Alisha. As of Dec 29th, 2022, they are 6 and 4 year old respectively and live in Dubai with their parents. My parents live in India and frequently visit Dubai to be around their grandkids. My vocabulary is probably limited to come up with the proper adjectives to express how much they love them both but let’s just say that I think they love their grandkids more than anything in the world. Well, maybe apart from their love for each other. Did I say that my parents are the best and the cutest couple I have seen in my life? 🙂

I live in Seattle and typically visit Dubai and India at least once every year. But I always want to visit them more than that because meeting them once a year doesn’t fulfill my appetite for family time. Though, being on an H1B visa, visiting family in India can be sometimes tricky. For example, this time around I needed to get a visa appointment slot booked before booking my India trip since my old H1B stamp was outdated and I needed a new one. For reasons beyond my understanding, the stamping cannot be done in the US and it’s recommended that you travel to your home country. Strictly technically speaking though, you can get visa stamping done anywhere outside the US. But if you ask any attorneys, they always recommend visiting your home country for this process to be on the safe side and avoid any extra security checks. For these reasons, I decided to visit India to get my visa stamping done.

Prior to COVID, getting a visa appointment wasn’t difficult and you could probably get one for the next week. But because of COVID, the US embassy in India stopped their operations for several months and only emergency cases were being reviewed. What this meant was that when the embassy fully opened post COVID, there was a huge pending backlog. The backlog was so big that the best one could do was get an appointment for the next year! Yes, you read that right, the next year!

Things did get better as time passed and the US embassy added more workforce in addition to giving an interview waiver to most candidates. In spite of this, when I tried to book an appointment in the month of October 2022, the earliest appointment in New Delhi was for September 2023! WTF. I took it. This meant that I couldn’t visit family till next year September and it made me really sad. It’s not that I couldn’t visit India but that if I did, I wouldn’t have been able to come back to the US because of a lack of a valid visa stamp. And being stuck in India for an extended period of time would have probably made me lose my job in addition to my legal status to live and work in the US.

I asked Alexa to set a reminder everyday at 11AM to check for visa appointment slots. And every day at 11AM, I would log in and check the earliest available visa dates. I kept doing this for a while and finally found an available visa slot for April 2023. I rescheduled my appointment. I was going to meet my family 5 months earlier than planned but I still wasn’t satisfied. I continued checking the visa dates. I found another one! This time for the month of March 2023. Another month shaved off before I would get to meet my family but I still wasn’t satisfied although I got less aggressive with my everyday routine of checking the visa dates. Alexa continued reminding me everyday at 11AM and I would check sometimes but didn’t find anything earlier than March.

Around the first week of December, 2022, I started feeling more homesick than I imagined. I got restless and impatient. I could feel it in my bones that I was really missing family and just wanted to be around them ASAP. I started checking for visa appointments first thing in the morning, multiple times in the day, and sometimes even in the middle of the night. I kept doing this till December 12 and voila! On that day, I got my visa appointment rescheduled for January 9, 2023! I bought my Seattle-Dubai ticket and Dubai-Delhi ticket that very day. I flew to Dubai on December 22, 2022. And boy, was I happy? 😀

I am going to stay in Dubai for a while with my parents, brother, sister-in-law, and my adorable niece and nephew. On January 3, 2023, I am going to fly to India with mom and dad to spend some quality 1:1 time with them. It has been a while since I stayed with my parents without my brother and his family in India so this would be very interesting and exciting!

Coming back to my current Dubai trip, it has been absolutely wonderful so far! I wake up early morning around 6AM and go on a 5k walk with my dad. We have such interesting conversations! By the time we are back from the walk around 8AM, the kids are up and I get morning hugs and kisses from both of them. We all play together till we get called for breakfast. Everyone, except my brother who sleeps till late, eats the breakfast together where Kabir and Alisha usually sit on my dad’s lap. I get my morning coffee and some really tasty breakfast and we talk for at least an hour sitting around the dining table. The conversations are varied but always engaging with lots of laughter. After breakfast, I usually grab my book and try to read for a bit sitting outside in the lawn or by the pool provided Kabir and Alisha let me read in peace and don’t want to start playing another game 🙂 My brother wakes up around 11AM and he and I often shoot some pool around noon in the living room. Both of us play at a similar level so it’s fun and nice and we also get a chance to chit-chat for a bit. My mom would usually ask me what I want to eat for lunch and dinner at the breakfast table. I am not a picky eater but being an Indian mother, she wants to feed me all the best possible Indian dishes. And I don’t say no either. We all sit together for lunch and like breakfast, end up talking for at least an hour before one of us decides to get up to do something else. The kids usually don’t sit with us for lunch and are fed by Hasina. Hasina is a live-in house helper. She’s great with the kids and cooks well too. There are a couple of other people who come clean the house and take care of the plants. They are both nice. One of them is from Hyderabad and can even speak fluent Hindi.

Coming back to my routine, post lunch, I try to read some more and the kids are busy playing something in their room or watching shows on TV. Mom and dad take a nap, my brother and I often shoot some more pool, and my sister-in-law takes care of the kids or finish any leftover household chores. Because of the time zone difference, I start feeling tired and sleepy around 4PM so I sometimes take a nap. Though, a nap becomes more than a nap most times where I end up sleeping for a few hours. Mom and dad usually go for an evening walk while I play some more with the kids before they are put to bed around 8PM. Around 9PM is dinner time and we usually don’t get up for at least a couple of hours. Dinner is also my favourite meal of the day! We talk about everything from our childhood stories, mom-dad’s honeymoon stories, my brother and my sister-in-laws experiences of living in Dubai, life philosophies, lots of laughter, and just pure heart to heart conversations about anything that comes to mind. Sometimes the conversations also get a bit serious like when they ask me questions about my single status. Lol. But I know those questions are very well intentioned so I respond as best as I can.

Not every day is the same. Some days, my sister-in-law and I go for a 1:1 brunch. Some days we all go out for lunch and dinner. Today we were invited by some relatives who live in Dubai for dinner. There is a concert that we are going to attend tomorrow. The day after that is a big family dinner that I throw every time I visit family where all of us dress fancy and go to a nice restaurant. It’s tradition. The day after that is New Year’s Eve and Dubai is well known for its fireworks around Burj Khalifa. That would be fun to watch. I am fully booked for almost every single day where every single day I get to spend more time with just family.

Post dinner, I usually read some more and make some notes in my diary. I try to sleep by 12-1AM but not today. I think I’ll sleep by 3AM today also because I started writing this journal and also because maybe I am still affected by the jet lag. But that doesn’t matter! I am just so happy and glad that I am here around people who love me the most and are my support system! I feel extremely lucky that I have a family like mine and really thank God for this ❤️

Oh, btw, here is the family pic when I took them out for dinner. Kabir and Alisha had slept.

Hope you enjoyed reading this!