What was my grandmother's house like? The first time I really thought about it, I was overcome with jealousy for what I didn't inherit, what I couldn't inherit. I was 26 and spending my summer in New York interning at a feminist news site (before most people knew what that meant, or Teen Vogue-level coolness). A wonderful editor, Corinna, invited me and a fellow intern to her house in the Berkshires. I didn't understand why she invited us to come over for the weekend, not just for dinner, because I was 26 and in New York for the summer and not always paying attention. Luckily, one of the other interns missed her train from Grand Central Station, so we had to reschedule and were able to pack our bags for the weekend trip.
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It was the first country home I'd ever been invited to, and it was the perfect escape from New York's August humidity. The Berkshires are about three hours north of New York, a region that stretches from northwestern Connecticut into Massachusetts, part of the Appalachian Mountains. This rural area with a thriving arts scene is where writers like Herman Melville and Edith Wharton once retreated, and where creatives still flock to for inspiration. It reminded me of Muskoka, where Toronto's wealthy (and Cindy Crawford) head when the temperatures rise.
I didn’t inherit physical land, but I did inherit two impulses about how I define home.
The following weekend, Corina picked me up from the train station, and on the hour-long drive home, she told me about the history of the house: Her grandmother had bought it with her third husband, and she had lived there several times, until she died. After Corina's parents inherited it, she spent time here sporadically, until one day she decided to move out of her apartment in the Bronx and make it her permanent home.
The house had a large porch in front, perfect for lazy summer evenings, where you could sit back in cushioned wicker chairs. Around the corner was a shower room that opened onto the garden. We had to make arrangements to avoid guests. The original house had been sloppily added on by each generation, with gold-framed art on nearly every wall, floral wingback chairs, and old-fashioned radiators in every room. The guest room I stayed in had the tiniest single bed I'd ever seen, piled with plump pillows on a white quilt embroidered with purple flowers in a perfect circle. Next to it was a pastel pink rug with wide stripes, and above it was an antique mahogany five-drawer dresser, and the window opposite the bed had heavy burgundy curtains. So, not everything matched, but everything exuded a cozy, historic feel.
I was impressed that my editor could place her wine glasses on the coffee table her grandmother chose, eat off the same plates, and walk on the same colored, different wood floors. In her home, the hardwood floors would probably have been tiled, the mahogany furniture would have been more formal in style, and the wingback chairs would have been replaced with rattan or teak. For the first time, I realized that I would never be able to visit a home like that.
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This pull at me brought into focus a feeling my friend had described to me: the sense that she would never inherit what she deserved. Having come to Canada as a refugee from Romania at age 10, she had a much clearer idea than I did of what her family had left behind — not just the possibility of an inheritance, but what it would mean. The urge to be grateful for what my family was able to build in our new country had been so powerfully instilled in me that I left no room for nostalgia for what we had left behind.
In my imagination, the closest thing to Corina's family home was Ehsan Manzil. My father and siblings spoke of the house with reverence, as if it were an older relative. The image of the house—its gorgeous four-pillared foyer, its rooms always packed with distant relatives, its rose garden with more than 1,000 rose bushes—became the set for my origin story. It was a place that conjured up rich colors—deep burgundy, burnt sienna, and yellow gold—and symbolized the wealth of the ayahs, cooks, and servants that other South Asian kids boasted about when they visited “home.”
It was the kind of place I would have loved to boast about owning, but as I examined my family's history of migration between cities, countries, and continents, I realized that although I inherited no physical land, I had inherited two impulses about how I defined home: a strong desire to put down roots, surpassed only by a desire to leave.
My father encouraged the elevation of Ehsan Manzil and called it his ancestral home, giving the impression that it had been in the family for generations, when in fact my grandfather had built it just a decade before he was born. But I knew we were not Hyderabadi. The Urdu my paternal family spoke lacked gentle inflections, and my father's knowledge of Telugu was limited to nursery rhymes. My dada, my grandfather, spent his early childhood in Saharanpur, north India, before being taken to Bahawalpur at age seven, then returning to Uttar Pradesh to study in Aligarh and eventually arriving in Hyderabad. My grandmother Dadi, on the other hand, grew up in Ambeta.
I was surprised to learn that Ehsan Manzil was built in 1934, two years before my grandmother was married off to my grandfather. It was a valiant attempt by my grandfather to preserve it as his ancestral home. However, he was unable to live there until his death, and subsequent partition made it impossible for his descendants to live there.
Article continues after ad There was a strong Western cultural narrative behind my desperate claim to a place of my own: home.
When I began researching Daddy's story, Ehsan Manzil was one of many myths that was deconstructed. Such discoveries sometimes felt like betrayals: myths told at the expense of more complex truths that could help me understand my family better. But in this case, there was a strong cultural narrative, a Western narrative, that contributed to my desperate desire to claim home as a place where I truly belonged. There's this idea that as an immigrant, I should have roots that are easy to trace, that the clothes I wear to multicultural day at school should represent my culture, that the coat of arms I put on a shiny tile should become part of the Canadian mosaic.
The resulting fantasy I unconsciously created was the idea that we came from a place we could point to on a map, an address we could claim as our own—a plot of land in a particular village, a house number in a city. This fantasy merged with the Bollywood images I grew up with: migrants returning to vast green fields waiting to be harvested, women spinning in pairs, singing “ghar aaja pardesi, tera des bulaae re” as their dupattas blow in the wind. (This is also, incidentally, an iconic scene from the 1995 film Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge. Yes, I am well aware that I am not a 50-something Punjabi man returning to his farm from London, and in fact, my family has not been a farmer for as long as I can remember.)
Perhaps this desire is born from the many times I’ve had people – colleagues, professors, taxi drivers – try to stick my face on a map. They want to know where my brown face comes from, ignoring the fact that non-natives are foreign on Canadian soil. With fellow immigrants and their recent descendants, I tend to be more open. With certain white people, I smile politely, tell them I’m from Canada, clarify that I’m from Toronto, and even name the suburb where I grew up, as if they’ve misunderstood what I’m saying. But sometimes people insist on wanting to know things that don’t concern me, and inevitably I tire out and give them what they want. Even if the Pakistani words just come out of my mouth smoothly, they get a thrill from discovering some kind of oriental creature hiding behind my Canadian accent.
Their curiosity is satiated, their gazes soften, they stop squinting and I see the skin around my eyes smooth out – as if my exotic origins were now clear. And there are the occasional comments stating that my Pakistani origins are a given, with excited responses about a neighbour who shares my roots, a love of curry or the completely wrong idea that Pakistanis are lighter skinned than Indians.
I was trying to add a footnote to my identity — that my parents are Indian, that the Indian subcontinent is very large, that skin color is not determined by latitude and longitude coordinates, that there is no neat gradient of skin color overlaid on a map — but that's too complicated to put on my little tile.
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From “Life in Exile: Disconnection, Reunion, and the Secret Life of My Grandmother” by Sadiya Ansari. Copyright © 2024. Available from House of Anansi Press.
