The Subaltern Desire Of My Calcutta Cousin

I was talking on the phone yesterday to my cousin Shefali Raha (no relation, so far as I know, to the other Raha in my life, Shomikho Raha), and it is at her request that I am writing about her on this blog today, with the hope that some of you might be able to help her out. Even if you are not familiar in any way with India, there is something that tells me that Shefali's dilemma is quite trans-national (and is even, dare I say it, 'universal'). Shefali was born and brought up in north Calcutta, and came to Delhi at the age of 16 where she received her college education and where she now works for a law firm in South Extension. Shefali is a fiercely 'independent' woman who has suddenly realised that the men became independent as long ago as 1947, she is highly suspicious of any 'absolutist' views, and she is in fact quite the 'modern Indian woman', a label which, depending on who your potential buyer is, can either enhance or reduce your value in the Indian marriage-market. Just for your perusal, here are some vital facts gleaned from Shefali's profile (deduced, of course, with her permission).
Name : Shefali Raha
Age : 29
Religion : Surely you must be joking?
Marital Status : Not applicable
Sense of Humour : Serious
Books : Mature(d), Textured, Sophisticated
Best friend : My dog Chow-chow

Food : Macher jhol (cannot be translated into English for problems of incommensurability)
Political affiliation(s) : Left-wing to Wing-less
Fashion : Khadi jeans, hemp denims, and jute skirts
Living : With myself, and even that is one person too many at times
Music : Any music that I can face
Although Shefali has now spent thirteen years in Delhi, she still misses home and her family dearly, and sometimes desperately wants to go back, a wish that she refers to as her Subaltern Desire. For her, 'home' is a space from which she originated, the ground where her roots firmly remain, and a zone of security, comfort, and stability. In Delhi, she suffers from a feeling of rootlessness, and she fondly thinks of her childhood and the myriad images associated with her years of growing up with the sights, the smells, and the sounds of suburban Calcutta.
She feels tired of having to live like a migrant perennially on the move, for she dwells in a precarious zone that is in-between her Bengali relatives in Delhi and her non-Bengali friends. When she is with her relatives in Chittaranjan Park, she experiences feelings of 'home', of 'belonging', and of being 'in place', and the security of having a stable identity, but she knows only too well that to be accepted by her non-Bengali friends as an authentic member of their group she must suppress whatever they might connect, rightly or wrongly, with her Bengali-ness, food, dress, and music included.
Consequently, for Shefali the certainty of belonging to fixed and stable roots is a luxury, and her life in Delhi is instead an ever-shifting and mobile kaleidoscope of various photographs, sounds, newspapers, promises, tears, bus-journeys, violences, films, taunts, rainbows, monsoon-showers, stories, beliefs, book-stores, quarrels, abuses, dust-storms, gains, and losses. Everything comes to her in partial fragments, and she has to patch them together every morning into a contingent configuration that will see her through the day. In this manner, her identity is being constantly challenged, dissolved, and remade, and she struggles hard to maintain some degree of continuity between her past, her present, and her future through the different patch-works that she knits together every day.
No wonder, then, that Shefali wishes so much to go back home to her family in Calcutta. And yet, this is where an ironic twist comes into her story. For no sooner has she spent seven days with her family that she fervently wishes to go back to the vast swirling anonymous masses of Delhi's rush-hour traffic. She feels trapped in the claustrophobic atmosphere that she finds at home, and her rising irritation with her parents is increased ten-fold when she has to visit with them her relatives who she thinks are outdated, superstitious, and reactionary, and quite frankly, simply stupid, miserably moronic, and impossibly idiotic. Consequently, whenever she is in Calcutta she yearns to run back to Delhi, the very same Delhi that had seemed so ghastly, uncouth, intimidating, and uncivilised a place just seven days earlier. Calcutta becomes one black hole stifling her individuality, her freedom and her creativity, and she seeks the solace of the masses of Delhi in whose midsts she can revel in and celebrate her 'space', her distinctiveness and her hybridity.
Do you see anything of yourself in Shefali (or anything of her in yourself)? Do you too experience occasional bouts of this Subaltern Desire, a Desire that you are unable to admit to the other self-styled atomised individuals around you? Do you feel pulled apart along two opposite directions, one between an affirmation of your 'private space' where you can flourish and a negation of this very space through an absorption into the wider circle of your family? Have you devised any methods, or gathered any tools for dealing with this urban paradox?