Searching for Home.
Author: Simran Chawla
Genre: Travel/Memior.
Publisher: HACHETTE INDIA
Year: Oct 2018
Format: Paperback, Kindle.
Blurb: In an age when India is one of the strongest emerging markets and a developing superpower, tens of thousands of Indians leave the country each year to seek new lives on distant shores. What are they looking for and what do they really find.
In Searching for Home, Simran Chawla documents the contemporary Indian immigrant experience in various corners of the world – from Alaska to the UK, Europe to Africa, the Americas to the Middle East. Searching for Home tells the stories of people who, though separated by thousands of kilometres, share experiences that continue to bind them to their homeland.
Sample
Excerpt from the Introduction
The idea for this book was born one night at a dinner party in London.
Just married and new to the city, I was introduced to a petite young woman, the wife of a good friend of my husband’s. Of a cheerful disposition, Preety’s shock of black curls bounced as she chatted animatedly, her hands fluttering to drive home a point. Her melodic accent was one I simply couldn’t place.
‘It’s French,’ she explained, twirling a finger around the rim of a glass of water. ‘I learned to speak French before English.’ Her lyrical voice and diction revealed a unique cocktail of accents: French, British and even Gujarati, the mother tongue of her parents.
‘Everyone speaks French in Madagascar,’ she elaborated. ‘That’s where I’m from.’
I could see why our respective husbands had introduced us to each other.
Like me, a person of Indian heritage, who had recently married a British Indian and moved to London from my home near Washington, DC, Preety had married and moved here from Madagascar. Instantly connecting over our marriage-related migrations, we laughed together, commiserating with each other over the generally dismal local weather and our endless commutes on the Underground. I shared with her my curiosity about the Indian population in London and just how unfathomably large it seemed to be.
‘There are many Indians in Madagascar too,’ she acknowledged.
‘In Madagascar?’
I shouldn’t have been surprised to hear that, but I was.
I knew the Indian diaspora comprised large communities of Indians living across the world – in the United Kingdom, the Gulf, North America and East African countries like Kenya and Tanzania and earlier, in Uganda. But I had never heard of an Indian community in Madagascar. That Indians had chosen to relocate there made perfect sense when you looked at a map, but for someone with very little knowledge of Madagascar, it seemed as random a destination as Charleston in the American state of West Virginia, where my own family had originally moved from New Delhi.
I’ve always entertained a romantic notion of the path my parents’ lives must have followed as they emigrated in their twenties from India to America. While their circumstances were not unique – the 1960s and ’70s were a time of great Indian emigrations to America –for me, their life as a young couple unfolds like an adventure. I cannot help but admire their spirit, living as they did in an era predating the Internet and the setting up of global networks that have ironed out the hitches of travel and made staying connected a nearly effortless and trouble-free endeavour. In my eyes, they were truly courageous to leave their families behind and set forth on a journey into the unknown with the earnest desire of creating a new life in a foreign country. It almost makes me wonder: what were they thinking?
My own emigration from America to the United Kingdom after getting married is still something I’m getting used to, even after nearly eight years. I still struggle with my feelings at the airport when I’m leaving after a visit to my parents’ home. I smile and exchange jokes with them as we prolong our good-byes as close to airport security as is allowed, then cry as I go down the escalator, out of their range of vision. Before we part, my dad tries to bring a smile to my face.
‘Beta,’ he says with a grin, ‘paunch kay, khath bhijwado [send me a letter once you’ve reached home.]’ .
I can’t imagine how my parents managed to leave their homes with such limited means of communication available at the time, sending handwritten messages to their families on sheets of blue airmail which would take fifteen days or more to travel from one home to another.
In America, I would often hear stories about how my parents’ generation had arrived in the country a few decades ago. Living as I did in England, however, where connections with India are far more tangible and complex and relationships with the rest of the world certainly more immediate, I was gradually exposed to the vast diversity of voyages out of India. I heard countless stories from friends, casually related over meals, about how families had come to settle in England. But it was Preety’s family history, in particular, following the trajectory of their lives as they moved out from India to England via Madagascar, that captured my imagination.
Read “Searching for Home” to hear Preety’s story and the story of many others across the world, from Alaska to Belgium and more.