The first time I set foot in my grandmother’s ancestral home in West Bengal, I was a visitor attending the region’s biggest festival. The Durga Puja festivities took over the whole town in a fervor that is still unmatched in my memory.

I felt like a tourist taking in the local sights. The heat of mid-autumn turned into sweat dripping down the collar of my traditional clothes, the humidity palpable in the air. As I walked around the courtyard of the old, brick house, which looked like it came right out of an illustration in a history book, I felt like I had stepped back into a sepia-toned page of the past.

As a child from a military family, my childhood was full of airplane tickets to West Bengal from all over India. Without a fixed address, Kolkata became my summer vacation destination for most of my childhood. I had been to my grandparents’ more modern apartment, but never to a home much older than I was and full of stories about my family that I could never begin to imagine. It was at that moment that I first felt like I was a part of the culture that I had only seen in old, grainy photos and…