Migration, a Ghost Story

Haunting of Impermanence, Othering of Self, and Ethical Failure of Borders

“Water is the consummate immigrant, trapped in transit, never able to settle.”

― Elif Shafak, There Are Rivers in the Sky

Namaste Friends,

I have been planning to post the second issue of the Khasi anthology series, which is already drafted, but kept postponing it because apparently not even two weeks can pass without the world hurling itself into dissonance even more than before. I blame it all on the anima of stories—they have their own imperatives and cosmic moments of revelation.

What I am telling you today is not usual or ordinary in any sense, though it oddly fits the fractured times we are simultaneously sailing through. To those of you who are reading this, I am grateful. For in you, my story finds a place.

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Source: Pinterest, Artist: Unknown

In the bitter cold of December 31st, 1999, we were dancing our way to the cusp of midnight. We planned to dance into the new millennium, but things did not turn the way we planned—like things never do. That night was a threshold, a fragile suspended moment between the probable and inevitable. It was the night when death closely brushed by us. That night my father had his first episode of myocardial infarction, a fancy word for heart attack.

I remember the dumb stupor that propelled the night into the relentless grasp of grief. The music blasted through the big box Solidaire speakers, their massive wooden bodies rumbling with 90’s pop as I watched my mother at a distance, running frantically to and fro, crying, almost about to faint—an arresting tragic sight unfolding in the midst of what was supposed to be a celebratory night. I stood there aghast in fear and reluctance. I was having fun, we were stepping into the millennium, I was only 7. A child who just wanted to live. I turned pale in horror at the sight of a few men rushing my now almost unconscious father away somewhere on a motorbike. I was stepping into a millennium of sorrows. I cannot stop thinking about what a perfect poetic mirror it was of our collective collapse. Looking back now, the grief was all too symbolic of the world as it stands now, devoid of its pretentious progressiveness and stripped of its fading narrative of equality and democracy.

My father lived that night, only to pass away 24 years later on a distant day, under dissimilar circumstances. But something else died that night. It was my worldview of permanence. I knew then what I now believe to be an absolute empirical truth of reality—the one we live in and share as a collective. Nothing is permanent. People, places, ideas, notions, feelings, philosophies, politics, governments. Everything is shifting, morphing, evolving or devolving—constantly, inadvertently.

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I have lived as a migrant all my life. I have carried the nomad in my soul as I drifted from one part of the country to another. Growing up in mixed communities meant for me dressing in identities rather than internalizing them. I was as much raised by the Syrian Orthodox missionary church¹ and school in central India as by my family. Central India is a queer cultural kaleidoscope of indigenous customs and migrants from the rest of the country who each spoke different Indian languages at home, worshipped vastly different pantheons, and celebrated varied festivals. My bedtime stories were riddled with the presence and magic of a faraway land² where these stories had originated, transferred from lips to ears, entrenched in psyche for generations. My mother spoke in the tongue of those who roamed barefoot through the black-soiled wetlands and marshes of the eastern peninsula—a land alien to me, raised amid red sandy dunes and rocky uplands.

These stories felt foreign to my waking life, where I was fostered by a multicultural chrysalis. All my life, I felt like I stood at the outpost of my own being, a place where identity clamored against conditioning. Where I was told I needed something solid on which to place my foot. That I could not cohabit with the ghosts of multiculturalism. But I questioned it all, because I did not feel solid or sure. I felt like a progeny of this and that, a legacy of the arid central landscape and its cultural offspring, both indigenous and immigrant. Everything influenced me, but nothing took hold of my heart with clenched fists.

I was abandoned in the orbit of my own solitude for refusing to affiliate with those limiting social boxes. It made me inhabit the world begrudgingly. It made me wonder if it was more important for society to uphold ideological righteousness than embrace a hurting child. It made me an eternal exile to the land my ancestors called home. A vagabond to those who followed the teachings of St. Thomas. An outsider to the traditional iron ore smelters, the Agarias³, who were indigenous to the state. I remained, firmly, a permanent outcast to a society that liked labels, hierarchy, and order.

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Like my ancestors, I too lived in places that did not, in society’s definition, “belong to me.” But I did not seek belonging in terms of ownership. What I craved was acceptance of my multicultural values. I wanted the world to see what I could see in my own heart—a beautiful rich tapestry of landscapes, stories, and cultures. A person blessed by many gods and goddesses, and possessed by none. It made me wonder about my ancestors, how isolated and strange they must have felt moving through this world. Their identities, like the rivers they left behind, flowing forward in all directions, seeking acceptance without the coercion of assimilation. I can imagine my foremothers and fathers drifting across vast wetlands and forests, plateaus and plains, sometimes outrunning beleaguering invasions, at other times passing like ghosts through the ruins of droughts and famines. Through the gossamer fabric of time, meandering and pondering on what has now become only an idea, a haunting—home.

Even when some of us never moved towns, cities, or countries, the entire human race is migratory in nature. At least one of our ancestors moved and survived some terrible predicament in some faraway land that is now foreign to us. The times are irrelevant—it could have happened in the prehistoric era, it could have happened at a time that predated the concepts of national and state borders, or during the premodern or colonial period. It could have been centuries ago in Asia or Europe. It could have been decades ago in Syria or Iraq. It could have happened in 2022, in Ukraine. It could have happened yesterday in Bangladesh⁴. Someone might be fleeing persecution, someone escaping a deadly plague, someone leaving behind a homeland drowning due to rising sea levels, some might be looking for better prospects of life in a country that promises social mobility. We know nothing of their tribulations, of their heartbreaks.⁵ If we knew how hard it is to leave behind all that makes us who we are, we wouldn’t blame the ones who migrated, for we would know what they did was a precept of their path. They carry a little of their culture into their new world, and that blending has always been happening since the beginning of globalization and trade. We are all immigrants of the world, passengers and passersby even. Travelers, if you will. In this realm of living, we are temporary. Then to what purpose are the proclamations of ownership and legality?

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Who decides the legality of a human being, and by what right is the authenticity of their crisis debatable? Who owns Mother Earth—the real one, who predates the imaginary lines of nations and states? Who decides in which corner of her abundant body each child is to root their tents? Who partakes in understanding the frivolity of her changes, what she keeps and what she destroys? Who monitors the ethics of immigration? Because the last time I checked, legal systems were still engaged in their punitive bureaucratic games. Humans have built systems that are incapable of such universal empathy, understanding, wisdom, and justice. And yet humans are not.

Throughout history, those who hold power have enjoyed impunity while questioning the humanity of those crushed by their machinery. But if we as individuals cannot speak without agendas or self-interest, we become part of that machinery—a reactionary validation of the violence designed to provoke our rage.

If we want to create a rupture in the machinery of exclusion, first we need to ask ourselves—can we actually speak without provocation, tell without insinuation, rise without spectacle? Can we stop lingering at the outstation of our own judgments? Can we look at the being before we meet the human? Are we willing to carry the weight of loving this world despite its impermanence?

I know at this point you might want to wave your fist at me—
”What do you know about risk? What have you ever lost?” or “People paid with their lives, and what did survival ever cost you?”

My simple response: Everything.

Everything that made me feel whole. Every certainty I clung to as a child. Every version of home I tried to build and watched dissolve. The luxury of belonging without question. The comfort of a single story, a single language, a single god. The illusion that permanence was ever mine to keep.

Like water, I have learned to move through the world—settling nowhere completely, carrying traces of every shore I’ve touched, forever in transit between what was and what might be. This is the inheritance of migration: to become a repository of ghosts, a living archive of all the homes we’ve loved and left behind.

1. The Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church (MOSC), known as the Indian Orthodox Church, it is part of the St. Thomas Christian community, tracing its origins to St. Thomas the Apostle in 52 AD.

2. My ancestors were displaced from what is now Bangladesh during the post-independence decades and its cataclasmic consequences

3. Historically known as “the iron smelters of Central India,” they were heavily affected by the import of English steel during the 20th century. They primarily reside in the Mandla, Dindori, and Balaghat districts of Madhya Pradesh

4. Bangladesh is one of the countries most vulnerable to rising sea levels, with projections suggesting 17% of its land could be submerged by 2050, displacing up to 20 million people. The country faces an average sea-level rise rate of 11.6 mm/year in some areas

5. Resignation syndrome is a rare, coma-like condition primarily affecting traumatized refugee and asylum-seeking children, notably in Sweden. Triggered by extreme stress, fear of deportation, and loss of hope, children withdraw into a vegetative, unresponsive state that can last months or years.

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