What would my grandmother’s house have looked like? The first time I really thought about it, I was struck with a pang of jealousy for things I had not inherited, could not inherit. I was twenty-six years old and spending the summer in New York interning for a feminist news site (before most people understood what that meant, let alone Teen Vogue-level cool). I had a wonderful editor, Corinna, who invited me and my intern to her house in the Berkshires. I didn’t understand that she was asking us to come for the weekend and not just for dinner, because I was 26, spending the summer in New York, and not always paying attention. Luckily, the other intern was running late to catch our train from Grand Central Station, and we had to reschedule, so I was actually able to pack a bag for our weekend.
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It was the first country house I was ever invited to, and a welcome escape from the August swelter that simmers in New York. The Berkshires are about three hours north of the city, a region of northwestern Connecticut that stretches into Massachusetts and includes part of the Appalachian Mountains. Tony cottage country with a vibrant arts scene where writers like Herman Melville and Edith Wharton once retreated, and where creative people still flock in search of inspiration. It reminded me of Muskoka, where Toronto’s moneyed class (and Cindy Crawford) head when the temperatures rise.
Even though I didn’t inherit a physical piece of land, I did inherit two impulses that relate to how I define “home.”
The following weekend, Corinna picked us up from the train station and, on the hour-long drive to her house, told us the history of the property. Her grandmother had bought it with her third husband and lived there intermittently—she had chosen to die in it. After Corinna’s parents inherited it, she spent time in the house intermittently until one day she decided to leave her apartment in the Bronx and move there permanently.
There was a large porch in front of the house with cushioned wicker chairs to sink into, perfect for balmy summer evenings. Around the corner from the porch was the shower, which opened onto the garden—we had to coordinate to make sure we weren’t expecting visitors. There were random additions from every generation to the original house, gold-framed art on nearly every wall, floral-patterned wing chairs, and old-fashioned radiators in every room. The guest room I stayed in had the smallest single bed I’d ever seen, with plump pillows piled on a white quilt embroidered with purple flowers with perfectly round blooms. Next to it lay a broad-striped pastel pink rug, with an antique mahogany five-drawer dresser at the headboard, while heavy burgundy curtains hung over the window opposite the bed. In short, nothing really matched, but each piece enhanced the atmosphere: cozy and steeped in history.
I was amazed that my editor could put her wine glass on a coffee table her grandmother had chosen, eat from the same plates, and walk on the same uneven wood floors. In my grandmother’s house, the wood floors were probably tiled, the mahogany furniture was more formal, the wing chairs were swapped for ones made of rattan and teak. It was the first time I realized I had nothing like it to visit.
This tormenting desire brought into focus a feeling a friend had expressed to me: the feeling that she was not inheriting what was rightfully hers. She had come to Canada as a refugee from Romania at age ten, which meant that she had a much clearer idea than I did of what her family had left behind—not just the possibilities of inheritance, but the meaning it had. The impulse to be grateful for what my family had been able to build in a new country was so deeply embedded in me that there was no room for missing what we were leaving behind.
The closest thing I could think of to Corinna’s childhood home was Ehsan Manzil. My father and his siblings spoke of the property with reverence, as if it were an older relative. The image of that house—a grand entrance flanked by four pillars, guest rooms always occupied by distant relatives, a rose garden with over a thousand bushes—became a permanent part of my origin story. It was a place that evoked rich colors like deep burgundy, burnt sienna, and yellow gold, and symbolized the kind of wealth other South Asian children boasted about when visiting “home”—ayahs, cooks, servants.
It was the kind of place I wanted to be proud of. But as I examined my family’s history of moving – cities, countries, continents – I realized that while I didn’t inherit a piece of land, I did inherit two impulses that relate to how I define home: a deep need to be rooted, surpassed only by a desire to leave.
My father supported this valorisation of Ehsan Manzil, calling it his ancestral home and creating the impression that it had been in the family for generations, when in reality my grandfather had built it just a decade before my father was born. But I knew we were not considered Hyderabadi – the Urdu my father’s family spoke had no sweet sing-song, and his knowledge of Telegu did not extend much beyond a nursery rhyme. My daada – my grandfather – spent his childhood in Saharanpur in northern India, was taken to Bahawalpur at the age of seven, then returned to Uttar Pradesh to study in Aligarh before finally moving to Hyderabad, while my grandmother – daadi – grew up in Ambehta.
I was surprised to find out that Ehsan Manzil was built in 1934, two years before my grandmother was forced to marry my grandfather. It was supposed to be our ancestral home, a brave attempt by his father to pass on his inheritance. But he could not even live there until the end of his life because the partition made it impossible for his descendants to live there.
There was a strong cultural narrative, a Western one, that contributed to my desperate attempt to claim home as the place where I truly belonged.
Ehsan Manzil was one of the many myths debunked when I began researching Daadi’s story. Sometimes such a discovery felt like a betrayal—a tall tale told at the expense of a more complicated truth that would help me better understand my family. But in this case, there was a powerful cultural narrative, a Western one, that contributed to my desperation to claim home as the place where I truly belonged. As an immigrant, there is the notion that I should have roots that are easy to trace, a uniform outfit I can wear on a multicultural day at school to embody my culture, a crest I can stick on my shiny tiles to be part of the Canadian mosaic.
The resulting fantasy I inadvertently created was the idea that we came from a place I could point to on a map, an address I could claim as ours—a piece of land in a particular village, a house number in a city. This fantasy merged with images from Bollywood that I grew up with: an immigrant returning to vast green fields ripe for harvest, women spinning in pairs, their dupattas blowing in the wind as they sing, “ghar aaja pardesi, tera des bulaae re.” (This also happens to be the iconic scene from the 1995 film “The Bulaae Re.”) Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge and yes, I am well aware that I am not a Punjabi man in his fifties returning from London to the farm, and that my family is not involved in farming as far as I can remember.)
Perhaps this desire stemmed from the fact that so many others tried to put my face on a map—colleagues, professors, taxi drivers who asked me to know the origins of my brown face, ignoring the fact that anyone who is not Indigenous on Canadian soil is a foreigner. With other immigrants or their recent descendants, I tend to be much more open. With a certain type of white person, I prefer to smile politely and say I’m from Canada, clarify that I’m from Toronto, and then name the suburb where I grew up, as if I’ve misunderstood what they’re getting at. But people can be stubborn about knowing things that are none of their business, and inevitably I get ground down to giving them what they want. Even the way Pakistani rolls off my tongue gives them the thrill of discovering some kind of Eastern being behind my Canadian accent.
I see their curiosity satisfied, their gaze on me loosen, the skin around their eyes smooth out as they stop blinking, as if that alone has revealed my exotic origins. And then an excited reaction about a neighbor who shares my roots, their love of curry, or the occasional comment that of course it makes sense that I’m Pakistani, as the idea that Pakistanis have lighter skin than Indians is completely false.
I used to try to add a footnote to my identity – that both sides of my family have roots in India, that the subcontinent is so vast, and that skin color can’t be determined by latitude and longitude coordinates, there are no neat gradations of skin color that we can overlay on a map. But that’s too complicated to fit on my tiny tile.
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Out of In exile: break-up, reunification and the secret life of my grandmother by Sadiya Ansari. Copyright © 2024. Available from House of Anansi Press.
