Inheritance is Identity

Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss is a fitting travel companion for someone as stateless as I when returning to the country of her birth. It doesn’t matter how un-often one makes this journey, questions of identity are bound to follow. Especially if identity displacement is your best friend and you keep her in your pocket at all times.

Inheritance has probably been the central theme of this trip as the backdrop involves my father’s bitter decade-long battle with his uncles to regain what is rightfully his. There are some aspects of birthright that we fight to own, there are others that simply run in our veins and linger in the air in the form of stories and memories and dust balls.

For starters, being in a room with my mother’s entire family is like staring your gene pool in its face. Everything from my pointy chin to the inability to finish anything once begun has been inherited. I no longer claim responsibility for anything, it is simply in my genetic make-up and is probably my mother’s fault.

My trip to Gujarat began in a second-class dabba on New Year’s eve. Never again. The train rattled with the snores of a thousand men and smelled of festering faeces, I brought in the new year somewhere on the Maharashtrian-Gujarati border where, officially, booze becomes illegal. In Ahmedabad, I dutifully visited the Sabarmati Ashram from where Mohandas K. Gandhi began his famous Dandi March. I stood amongst huts once occupied by Gandhi and his followers, where he prayed and ate and slept, where he inspired and led people to take back what belonged to them. If this is where the notion of birthright began for contemporary India and Indians, then it is still being fought for in every sense of the word, whether in the domestic realm or in terms of autonomy of state. We are all wanting to take back what is “ours”, divide up and own.

I had never quite felt Indian enough, never knowing my family enough, never being able to speak Gujarati with the confidence I ought to have, always wanting to validate the Indian passport that I hold with more Indianness.

On we went to Khambat (or Cambay, if you like), our “ancestral” town. My great grandfathers from both sides of the family are said to have been visionaries and ahead of their times, they were entrepreneurial and shifted each family from subsistence-living to the throbbing, pre-war gemstone trade (a family business which will end with my generation, if I can help it). They were big fish in small ponds, they set out to Burma and subsequently got chased out, their various offspring now span a bunch of continents. Their legacies remain in the form of two mansions that sit like haciendas amidst shacks. Empty ghost houses, filled only with the stories we remember, rest forgotten. I see romance in these: a dusty gramophone, a teak headboard, an electric water heater. Oddly, I belong.

Everyone in town knows who I am, but I haven’t got a clue who they are, but I know we are part of each other. I know this because an old woman, who used to be my father’s nanny, who has since been forgotten by my family, is filled only with memories of love that moves her to tears when she speaks of them. I cry with her because it hurts to be forgotten.

My past is not made up primarily by patriarchs, mind you. My womanhood is connected to generations of women who personify the words endurance and sacrifice. Child marriages, financial devastation, death of toddlers, young widows, domestic violence, you name it. I sit with them and they laugh toothless laughs because my accent is so silly and they feed me some more because they love me even though they’ve met me, like, twice. And I am proud that their blood runs in my veins because this is blood of silent strength and perseverance. This is Superwoman blood. This blood makes people weep.

What roots are these that clutch? Well, they’re mine: they are my roots.