The Reason Why
My family migrated endlessly. The first journey was from India to England, but then we moved back and forth, settling and re-settling. Each one of us, within the family looking for our own individual versions of belonging.
My father had left his home behind once already in pre-partition India; the belonging he craved was to a place that no longer existed. My mother's belonging was to her own mother - the only grandparent I had remaining at the time we decided to return to India, aged nine. I saw my paternal grandparents three times in those years. Back then, in the early '80s flying a family of four, then five back home on a single salary was a once in a two to three year kind of a trip and that too with considerable saving and sacrifice.
We lived for all of those years in hospital accommodation. We didn't buy a house because we never intended to stay.
There was a time, when steeped in the rhetoric of 'immigration', I did not see my parents' journey for what it was - an immense act of bravery. It was a different world back then; for many, it still is. Although this podcast is not focused on the global pandemic, it is impossible not to reflect on the time that we are living through. For those who are far from home, far from loved ones, the COVID-19 pandemic has taken us back to an era when the heartache of distance was in some moments unbearable.