It is the night of my cousin Sayanti's wedding and I am huddled on a rooftop with my gang of cousins. It is nearly 4 a.m., and we keep warm by wrapping woolen shawls around our shoulders and passing around a bottle of whiskey. There is a steady exchange of drinking stories, dirty jokes carefully translated out of colloquial Bengali to English, and bursts of laughter. The auspicious full moon is falling, and prayers from the Muslim neighborhood across the Ganges leak into the sky.

I lean my head back against the crumbling brick and feel overwhelmed by the textures of India. But somewhere between the yawns and the plumes of cigarette smoke, I realize this is the first time I have truly felt at home here.

Like most second-generation Indians, I've made a regular chain of pilgrimages back to India while growing up. The journeys were always a mix of extremes. In elementary school, it meant taking a few weeks off school, lugging around giant suitcases full of everyday items like sponges and hand lotion, and battling with a monstrous array of insects and diseases that always seemed to come right for me. But it also meant the warmth of being surrounded by dozens of relatives and cousins, who would dress me up in saris, teach me to play badminton on the roof and feed me sweet peas from the pod.

But beyond the jet lag, the mosquito bites and the stomach troubles, it was always a negotiation of self that was the most troublesome. I would get teary-eyed when family members made fun of my accented, halting Bengali, and feel uncomfortable in the traditional Indian outfits that I would sweat through, or in the stares that my shorts and T-shirts produced. Usually, India just wore me out -- the heat, the dust, the subtle interrogations to find out if I was "Indian enough."

When I was a teenager, India felt particularly alien. At 15, I tried to explain to my older cousins how I snuck out of my parent's house to attend all night raves in old roller skating rinks -- only to be met with blank stares. When, at 19, I decided to spend a month with my grandmother in our ancestral home -- located in a sleepy village about 30 miles north of Kolkata -- I felt like an imposter. I had spent the last four months doing an internship at the Philadelphia School District, deep in activist work to help change curriculum. But I had also been binging on 40s and blunts, and dating an alarming number of boys. For three weeks, I spent lazy afternoons keeping my mouth shut while listening to my grandmother gossip about young women who ruined their reputations by being seen unchaperoned.

On this visit, I was prepared to feel like an outsider. But it didn't go down that way.

The first night I handed off a Panjabi MC CD to a cousin and before I knew it, the whole house -- from uncles to newborns -- was dancing up a storm. My cousins showed off a mix of bhangra and breakdance moves they picked up from clubs in Bangalore, where they attend college.

One day, my 21-year-old cousin Sagnik poured out his heart to me about a six-year relationship he had with a girl that started when he was 14. Since his parents thought he was too young to date, he had to sneak around. I was amazed at how closely his situation mirrored my own adolescence. I might have had an easier time sneaking off to see my boyfriend back in the day, but Sagnik and I shared the same frustrations about the difficulty communicating with our traditional parents.

Like everywhere in the developing world, a mix of Internet access, cable TV and overall modernization are changing society. I always felt like my family in India lived an entirely different existence from me, but I realized that there was never really that much of a divide.

Of course, my family still ganged up and made fun of my accent. But they also took time to listen to the activist work I do in the South Asian American community. They argued with me about global politics and India's role in the "war on terror," and asked me -- earnestly -- about my love life. Perhaps I am simply old enough to have more of a sense of who I am and express it proudly. But whether I was stringing up flowers for my cousin's wedding, gossiping with all my aunties about the latest sari styles or sneaking off for cigarettes on the back of my cousin's motorcycle with my dupatta flapping in the wind, I felt whole for the first time in my motherland.