My grandmother died three years before I was born, when my mother was pregnant with my older brother. I cannot tell you what that time was like, because no one speaks of it. In the aftermath, my grandfather moved to live with us, and for the first several years of my life I knew him without relation to her. I would rush home from preschool to jump on the bed where, in my memory, he always was, spreading my toys between us. I had no idea what he had lost, recently or previously—what any of my family had.
Over the course of my life, mentions of my grandmother were so sparse I could almost forget that she had existed, though I never did. I knew she had been a schoolteacher in Kampala, just as I had been in Boston and Toronto; I had always felt a kinship with her. From her photographs I could see we shared the features that set me apart, the soft face in a family of sharp angles, the wide nose. But that was about all I knew of her; she was another piece of the past that we didn’t speak of.
Silence is the language of my family. Like many families who have experienced loss, the violence of dictatorships and the trauma of displacement, we did not speak these memories out loud. I understood enough not to ask questions. I was an intuitive child; I didn’t know why, but I knew what it meant when the room went quiet, when my father’s voice, mid-memory, simply stopped.
There was so much we didn’t discuss, so many words I did not know. My family was exiled, I remember parroting to my friends in elementary school, because that was what I had been told, though I understood nothing of all that word carried.
I would learn its meaning later: exile, as in, to be forced to leave, banished, barred from coming back. To be exiled speaks not just of the past but also of the future: you will not return. Indeed, my grandmother never did. She was born into a Hindu family in Karachi before Partition, when it was still a part of British India. She and her family lived in the Hindu quarters of a predominantly Muslim city, which my grandmother’s sister once described as heaven on earth. I wonder what that meant to her–heaven–if heaven was even something she believed in. In 1947, when the British divided the country, the place my grandmother had lived her entire life was given a new name; my family, alongside millions of others in both directions, fled in search of somewhere to resettle across the new border. My grandmother, with her siblings and parents, became a refugee for the first time—but not the last. Though I don’t know if they used that word. Later, she sailed to Uganda after marrying my grandfather, who was born in East Africa; they lived in Kampala, where my father and aunts and uncles were born, where they all remained until they were expelled in 1972 under Idi Amin’s expulsion of Asians. That was the second time.
I have heard my aunt use the word refugee to describe their situation many times, my father, sometimes but less so. But I have always wondered about my grandmother, whether this word would have seemed adequate in capturing the cycles of history she had endured, if it might feel incommensurate to her burden.
Only recently have I begun to find the language for the particular silence of my family: that in a moment, a memory can transform from past to present. That remembering can be difficult, the burden not just in the memory but its articulation. And that somewhere between the vast magnitude of what happened and the precision of language, another instinct steps in, a protective one perhaps, an urge to look away and move forward. If we cannot return, then let us not try, not even in the untethered space of the mind.
But silence is its own carrier. My father anxiously stocks and restocks the pantry, the accumulating stash never enough. My aunt draws kajal behind my ear to protect me from the evil eye and scolds me for not wearing more makeup, saying I must always look prepared. My grandfather dies and my parents make up a story that he has flown suddenly away, unable to break my heart with the truth that families do not always remain whole, and I wait, wait, for him to come back.
If silence was my inheritance, the writer in me demanded that I turn towards that absence and find language for the unsaid. The questions my grandmother left in her wake became a roadmap for writing. What does belonging mean—to a land, a people, a community—when nothing is permanent? How does that kind of rupture, unforeseen and repeated, shape a person’s understanding of rootedness, of home? I think of the gulf between my grandfather and me when I came home from preschool, unaware of what he was missing as I tossed my toys across his bed. Of the gulf between myself and my parents, the pieces of their lives I could never know. These are the waters I wanted to wade through. As I wrote, a main character in my novel began to follow my grandmother’s trajectory, her journey guided by my imagined answers to unanswerable questions. She took on weight, a shape. She cackled and smirked and said things like, I always impress. I spoke to family and community spread across the world since the expulsion, heard stories that surprised me and learned words I hadn’t known. Heaven on earth, my great-aunt said, refugee, my aunt said, greenest grass, said my father. And always, I wondered about my grandmother, what words she might have used.
During my research, my father gave me a book of photographs and newspaper articles from the ninety days leading up to Amin’s expulsion deadline, crowdsourced and self-published by a man named Z. Lalani. When I opened it, a loose page slipped out, a grainy print-out that had clearly been tucked away and forgotten. It was an article from the New York Times published in 1976, titled The Uganda Exiles: In Britain, I miss… There, gazing back at me from the black and white photograph, was my family: my grandfather, leaning with crossed arms against the garish wallpaper, my grandmother in a sari and cardigan, my father in what appear to be bellbottoms, and my aunt, eyes lowered from the camera. The article recounts how the Ugandan Asian exiles were faring in the places they had settled, detailing the language barriers, the poverty and isolation, and the resourcefulness of the group as a whole. But I hardly took note of those particulars, because I couldn’t get past the first paragraphs, which open by describing Mrs. M. C. Oza—my grandmother—habitually shutting off the light in the kitchen while her husband and children are busy, and weeping into her hands. ‘“I try so hard not to miss Uganda, but I do,” she said softly the other night… “We left everything in Uganda, everything including our precious peace of mind.”’ There they were, for the first time: my grandmother’s own words. She did not say refugee, but she said, look how we live now. She did not say heaven on earth, but she said, precious peace of mind.
Raised in a family that did not speak these experiences out loud, I assumed they had no language for them. There was a certain logic to the idea that I, a generation after the fracture and the only person in my family to experience both childhood and adulthood in the same place I was born, would be the first to put words to our story. It was the privilege of distance. I was of the generation that could look back and attempt to make narrative of what had come to pass. If there was pride in that knowing, there was also a great sense of responsibility, a weight I didn’t know if I was equipped to carry. And yet, here was my grandmother speaking, searching for her precious peace of mind.
What I was most unprepared for were the reverberations I would discover in my own life. When I sold my novel, my father told me that not only had my grandmother taught, but she had also written poetry. I had not known this, but it had always been true. It was a stunning revelation to me, a confirmation of something I had always felt connecting us. “I see her in you and guiding you,” he said. I too had felt this throughout my life, though I could never have known the ways it might echo hers.
Months later, my aunt casually mentioned that my grandmother had published a poem in Gujarati once, sometime in the mid 1970s in London, processing the experience of expulsion and resettlement. My aunt didn’t know the details of where it was published, nor did she remember the poem itself, no matter how I probed, in a flurry of bewilderment and awe.
I wanted desperately to find that poem. But the details were so vague, so pre-internet, it seemed impossible. I imagined traveling to London and hunting through the archives of every known Gujarati print journal from the 70s. I dreamed of sharing my search on Heavyweight, the podcast where Jonathan Goldstein helps guests resolve moments from their past that they are carrying around, going on deep search missions to answer the big questions in their lives. Mostly, I resigned myself to the fact that it was beyond reach.
Still, the revelation shook me. I had known so little of my grandmother, of my family’s past, and yet every new morsel that was revealed to me connected us further. I had grown up believing my family had no language for what had happened, but my grandmother did. Often, I have felt frustrated that this resonance between us exists only in the intangible: writing, memory, blood. None of these make up for the time we did not have together. There is so much I will never know. But there is a page on which my grandmother and I can coexist, something we never did in the living world. What feelings had her poems circled around, I wondered; what was she attempting to say? The more I learned about my grandmother, the more I ached to hear her words.
In the early days of my book tour, I told the story of my grandmother’s lost poem for the first time. In response to one reader’s question about whether I had learned anything surprising during my research process, I excitedly recounted my grandmother’s writing life, the poem that I still dreamed of one day finding. “How do we find that poem?” my friend wistfully asked me afterwards, and we lamented the possibilities.
The next morning, I woke up to a slew of WhatsApp messages from my father, who was on a trip to India visiting family at the time. In my half-awake state I swiped through photographs of relatives until I came to a picture of a page in a notebook dated 1946. Composer: Bhagwati Oza, it said, and underlined at the top: Sea Sight. It was a poem written in blue ink in my grandmother’s hand, about joy and sorrow and the sea. If the notebook is dated correctly, she would have written it before she left Karachi for India during Partition, before she sailed from India to Uganda to live with my grandfather, before she fled Uganda for wherever would take her in. It was before any of the major ruptures of her life, at least those that are known to me. And yet she was writing of the sea, of all that it carried. What might she have foreseen, I wondered. Had she too felt her life guided by an ancestor she’d never met; was she too writing towards someone she felt she had always known? “Life is full of ebbs & tides,” she writes in the poem. In her words I registered an echo in the final lines of my own book, a scene that occurs at the edge of the water, as the waves break and mend, break and mend.
I have since told this story countless times. I have been writing about my grandmother for years. For years I have been reaching for a version of her, constructing that version through words and imagery, dialogue and metaphor. These words are all mine. Through my writing I have built a bridge towards her, but it is poorly fashioned, or else it is a trick. A bridge, you see, should function in both directions. And while I can travel towards my grandmother across this bridge of my own making, she cannot travel towards me.
Here lies the less articulated grief of not knowing an ancestor, which is that she in turn did not know me. Beneath this grief lie further griefs. I have imagined a version of my grandmother who would have loved me, who would have felt as connected to me as I have felt all my life to her. But I cannot help the part of me that asks if this would be true. I do not know how she would have understood me, through the generations, the language barriers, the layers of distance that being raised in another land impose. I do not know how she would have viewed my queerness, if she would have loved the woman I love. The grief is in the endlessness of the speculation. There can be no answer to these questions. I must simply live in this space.
In Yiyun Li’s novel Where Reasons End, the narrator and her son who has died converse through the space of the page. It is perhaps the only avenue of communication available to them, a dimension where the living and dead can meet. “We look for some depth in words when we can’t find it in the three-dimensional world, no?” the narrator-mother says to her son.
So, perhaps I am wrong that we cannot move towards one another. For the most part, I only know the world of the living. I do not know what lies beyond, or whether a bridge constructed through words lost and found, words researched and imagined, can reach the other side. Here, another question I can’t answer. But, I can believe.
I have referred to her throughout this essay only as my grandmother. This is not a literary choice but a consequence of loss: I never knew my grandmother, so I did not know what to call her. The name that I might have called her—with affection, with annoyance, with need—has been absent all my life. It was only when it came time to write the dedication to my novel that I had to confront that silence. Bhagwati-baa, my father said when I asked him, before we both slid into tears. Grief has so much to do with language, with the failures of language, with the loss of it. My family lost their home unexpectedly and cannot speak of it. My grandmother died suddenly, a truth both simple and unfathomable that we still cannot discuss. But now I have a name for her, a word I had never claimed. Sometimes we find the language we never had; sometimes it comes back to find us. My baa had words, as do I. And in unexpected moments, Baa’s words have found me. There are some things that, once lost, cannot return—the home, the land, the community, the birthplace, the nation undivided, the person, the memory. And there are some, it seems, that can.
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