Growing up, I always felt out of place somehow. One moment I was speaking too loudly, the other my limbs were too hairy, small insecurities chased me throughout my childhood insisting that I feel a sense of wrongness at every friend’s house and in every classroom. As I grew older, my skin got thicker, and I learned to live with it. The many needling comments eventually manifested in a surly demeanor that was offputting on a thirteen-year-old girl. When I finally hit adulthood, I started paying more attention to the surroundings I had come from, my family, and our history. While I never felt that persistent wrongness at home, it seemed to crop up in all sorts of places where my roots were involved. It crept around, always lurking, at crowded functions where I didn’t understand what was being said or why I couldn’t seem to get closer to the other kids my age. At dance lessons where I could never get the steps just right or at parties under the watchful eye of faceless uncles and aunties. A good chunk of childhood, especially when it involved my own culture, was a whirlwind combination of discomfort and joy. I danced to my favorite songs with children who would never be my friends, I ate my favorite sweets in a place of worship but I didn’t feel close to god. I was like the small bits of fried chickpea batter in my mom’s dahi, adrift and ceaselessly searching for something to belong to.
Eventually, I resolved to spend less time engaging with my culture, convinced that the less I confronted my discomfort the better chance I would have of belonging to my world of Western American excess. However, after four years of the special form of torture that was my predominantly white public high school, I found myself in university studying history full-time. Suddenly, I was curious about everything I had discarded and found that the sense of belonging I had searched for was lost generations before me. I knew my mother’s family was from Amritsar in Punjab, a northern region of India that is partly in the nation of Pakistan. I had grown up on stories from my Nani and Nanaji vaguely telling of land that was lost and the struggles of their parents, my Bapuji and Biji. But as I asked more questions of my parents and of my history professors I began to gain a fuller understanding of the widespread displacement my people had faced only seventy years ago. A story of mass exodus and violence that is quieted or overlooked often due to just how traumatic an event it was.
In 1947, the British Empire entrusted a single Englishman to draw a line on a map that would force an estimated fifteen million people to abandon their ancestral homelands and move hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles. After less than five weeks of surveyance, the English civil servant, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, drew out the boundary line that would partition post-colonial India into two separate nation-states. These two nations were the new secular Republic of India and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Both of my grandparents were children when the boundary was drawn and yet they are hesitant to speak of their families’ forced emigration even now. Over time, the small details they shared stuck within me, unearthing a trail of wrongness that I now saw cut through my family’s history in a wide red gash. Stories of jewelry being left buried on the lost land for the day they might return, and violence that my grandparents, then small children, were protected from on the road. When my Nana and Nani finally crossed the border into India, they counted themselves lucky, they hadn’t lost family members in the crossing, as many others had.
In my more depressing moments, I wonder if this family history of division and displacement manifests itself in the lives of all my family members, myself included. It is just as silly as it is comforting to attribute that haunting sense of displacement I have felt all my life to some concrete past event. The uprooting of my family from that land where we had existed for countless generations before was a turning point in our history, a migration that would eventually lead to us leaving the whole Asian continent behind. I wonder if the many journeys we took from that ancestral earth made it so that now when I try to put down my roots somewhere new it’s like trying to grow flowers in salted soil. The less cynical part of me would like to believe that it is possible regardless. I try to remind myself that worlds away from that homeland I have never seen is still a family that grew strong enough to raise me, even my mom and her siblings. But it is a sobering thought to know that for over a hundred years your lineage has been far from home, with no way to go back. Perhaps that’s why that pesky ghost of wrongness continues to haunt me, but I guess it also means that the same strength my family used to overcome such a thing exists in me. While saddening, it is a comforting thing to remember when just leaving the house seems like a terrifying challenge.
