What would my own grandmother’s home have looked like? The first time I really thought about it, it sent a pang of jealousy through me for things I had not inherited, could not inherit. I was twenty-six years old, spending the summer in New York interning for a feminist news site (before most people understood what that meant, let alone being Teen Vogue-level cool). I had a wonderful editor, Corinna, who invited me and my fellow intern to her home in the Berkshires. I didn’t understand she had asked us to come for the weekend, not just for dinner, because I was twenty-six years old, in New York for the summer, and not always paying attention. Luckily, the other intern was late to catch our train out of Grand Central Station and we had to reschedule, which allowed me to actually pack a bag for our weekend away.
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It was the first country house I was ever invited to, and a welcome escape from the August humidity bubbling in New York. The Berkshires are about three hours north of the city, a region in northwest Connecticut stretching into Massachusetts featuring part of the Appalachians. Tony cottage country with a vibrant arts scene, it’s where writers like Herman Melville and Edith Wharton once retreated to, and where creative types still flock in search of inspiration. It reminded me of Muskoka, where Toronto’s monied class (and Cindy Crawford) head when temperatures rise.
Although I have not inherited a physical plot, I’ve inherited dual impulses related to how I define home.
The following weekend, Corinna picked us up from the train station, and on the hour-long drive to her home she told us about the history of the property. Her grandmother bought it with her third husband, and she lived in the house in waves—choosing to die in it. Once Corinna’s parents inherited it, she would spend spells of time in the home until one day deciding to leave her apartment in the Bronx and move there permanently.
There was a large porch out front, with cushioned wicker chairs to sink into, perfect for languid summer evenings. Around the corner from the porch was the shower, which was open to the garden—we had to coordinate to make sure we weren’t expecting company. There were haphazard additions from each generation onto the original home, gold-framed art on nearly every wall, wing-backed chairs covered in floral patterns, and old-school radiators in every room. The guest room I stayed in had the tiniest single bed I’d ever seen, made up with plump pillows piled on top of a white quilt embroidered with purple flowers with perfectly circular blooms. Next to it lay a wide-striped pastel pink rug, a mahogany five-drawer antique dresser at its head, while heavy burgundy curtains hung over the window opposite the bed. In short, nothing really matched but every item cemented the vibe: cozy and storied.
I was in awe that my editor could set her wine glass on a coffee table her grandmother had chosen, eat off the same plates, and walk the same mismatched wood floors. In my grandmother’s house, the hardwood floors would have likely been tile, the mahogany furniture more formal in style, wingback chairs swapped for rattan and teak ones. It was the first time I realized I had nothing similar to visit.
This desire tugging at me pulled into focus a sentiment a friend had expressed to me: a sense she wasn’t going to inherit what she was owed. She came to Canada from Romania as a refugee when she was ten, meaning she had a much clearer idea than I did of what was left behind by her family—not just the possibilities of inheritance, but the meaning in it. The impulse to be grateful for what my family was able to build in a new country was so forcefully implanted in me, it didn’t leave room for missing what we left behind.
The closest thing to Corinna’s family home in my imagination was Ehsan Manzil. My father and his siblings spoke of the property with reverence, as if it was an older relative. The image of this home—a grand entrance flanked by four columns, guest rooms always full of distant relatives, a rose garden with over one thousand bushes—became a set in my origin story. It was a place that evoked rich colors like deep burgundy, burnt sienna, and yellow gold, denoting the kind of wealth other South Asian kids boasted about when they visited “back home”—ayahs, cooks, servants.
It was the kind of place I wished I could boast about having some claim to. But examining my family’s history of moving—cities, countries, continents—has made me realize although I have not inherited a physical plot, I’ve inherited dual impulses related to how I define home: a deep need to feel rooted exceeded only by a desire to leave.
My dad encouraged this elevation of Ehsan Manzil, referring to it as his ancestral home, giving the impression it was in the family for generations, when really, my grand-father had built it a mere decade before my father’s birth. But I knew we weren’t considered Hyderabadi—there was no sweet lilt to the Urdu my dad’s family spoke, and his knowledge of Telegu didn’t exceed much beyond a nursery rhyme. My daada—my grandfather—spent his childhood in Saharanpur in northern India, taken to Bahawalpur at seven, then returning to Uttar Pradesh to study at Aligarh before eventually making his way to Hyderabad, while my grandmother—Daadi—grew up in Ambehta.
I was surprised to discover Ehsan Manzil was only built in 1934, two years before my grandmother was forced to marry my grandfather. It was meant to be our ancestral home, a valiant attempt at legacy on his part. But he wasn’t even able to live there until the end of his own life, Partition then making it impossible for his descendants to inhabit it.
There was a strong cultural narrative, a Western one, that contributed to my desperation to claim the home as the place I actually belonged.
Ehsan Manzil was one of the many myths that were deconstructed when I started researching Daadi’s story. Sometimes a discovery like this felt like a betrayal—a tall tale told at the expense of a more complicated truth that would help me understand my family better. But in this case, there was a strong cultural narrative, a Western one, that contributed to my desperation to claim the home as the place I actually belonged. As an immigrant, there’s an idea I should have roots that are easy to trace, a single outfit to wear to multi-cultural day at school to encapsulate my culture, a coat of arms to put on my shiny tile to be part of the Canadian mosaic.
The resulting fantasy I inadvertently created was the idea that we were from a place I could point to on a map, an address I could claim as ours—a plot of land in a specific village, a house number in a city. This fantasy melded with images from Bollywood I grew up with: an immigrant returning to vast green fields ripe for harvest, women spinning in pairs, their dupattas blowing in the wind while singing, “ghar aaja pardesi, tera des bulaae re.” (This happens to also be the iconic scene from 1995’s Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge and yes, I am well aware that I am not a fifty-something Punjabi man returning to the farm from London, and, in fact, my family has not farmed in memory.)
Maybe this desire came from so many others trying to pin my face to a map—colleagues, professors, cab drivers pushing to know the origins of my brown face, ignoring the fact that anyone except for an Indigenous person on Canadian land is foreign. With fellow immigrants or recent descendants, I have the tendency to be much more open. With a certain type of white person, I prefer to smile politely and say I’m from Canada, clarifying from Toronto, further naming the suburb I grew up in, as though I misunderstand what they’re getting at. But people can be persistent about knowing things that are none of their business, and inevitably I am worn down into giving them what they want. Even the way Pakistan rolls off my tongue gives them the thrill of discovering some sort of Eastern creature hiding behind my Canadian accent.
I can see their curiosity satisfied, their tight gaze on me loosening, the skin around their eyes smoothing out as they stop squinting, as though that alone has unlocked my exotic origins. And then, an excited response about a neighbor who shares my roots, their love of curry, or the occasional comment stating that of course it made sense I’m Pakistani because of a deeply incorrect notion that Pakistanis are fairer-skinned than Indians.
I used to try and add a footnote to my identity—that both sides of my family had roots in India, that the subcontinent is such a large place, and that skin color can’t be determined by latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates, no neat gradation of skin color we can overlap on a map. But that’s too complicated to put on my tiny tile.
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From In Exile: Rupture, Reunion, and My Grandmother’s Secret Life by Sadiya Ansari. Copyright © 2024. Available from House of Anansi Press.
