ABSTRACT
Arriving at Southern Cross station by bus from the airport early July 2015 I decide to hail over a taxi to take me to my hosts’ address whom I will be staying with for a week. I am in Melbourne to meet some of the informants I initially interviewed in 2005–2006 as part of my fieldwork among Indian students in Australia at the time. As I get in the taxi I notice from the name on the ID-tag on the dashboard (Gurjit) that the driver is Punjabi and we quickly strike up a conversation about the city and his life there. In passing I mention that a decade earlier I would regularly attend a gurdwara in the suburb of Blackburn on Wednesday evenings when large groups of Indian students would congregate there for the free food that was handed out after service. There were two gurdwara’s [sic] in Melbourne at the time but apparently there are five now, or so Gurjit claims. He himself came to Melbourne some 7.5 years ago to study accounting at a college of which he no longer remembers the name nor actually knows if it still exists. He took up taxi driving as a part-time profession while studying and continued doing so after he finished his degree. Originally from Chandigarh he got married two years ago and now has an eighteen months’ old [sic] son. Both his wife and son are in India though and contact is mainly through Skype. I ask him if he wouldn’t rather be in India with them but he shrugs and explains: “now can’t go home mate”. He is waiting for his Australian permanent residency (PR) application to come through, “then I am going home”. He is not sure if he will come back to Australia as he first wants to explore what his opportunities in India itself are.
