The accidental refugee and the crisis of accepting who you are: a short essay on belonging.

I exult in the fact I can see everywhere with a flexible eye; the very notion of home is foreign to me, as the state of foreignness is the closest thing I know to home.
― Pico Iyer

Living in Dubai, a city with one of the world’s most diverse populations due to its dependency on a large ex-pat workforce, I am often asked the ubiquitous question, “so, where are you from?”. It’s an impossible one word answer for me, as it must be for an increasing number of people, who like me, have lived half their life across a rapidly globalized planet.

To start from the very beginning – an Indian Hindu man marries a Parsi Zoroastrian woman. Their first born is me. A most inauspicious start to the idea of one person being only from one place with one religion. Mixedness begins in my marrow, it spreads outwards across the rest of my life like a vibrant watercolour.

The Indians themselves are a mixed lot through centuries of foreign invasions, from the Mongols to the Macedonians and every pillaging demagogue in-between. There is no such thing as one Indian alone, just as there is no one pure Parsi. Some Parsis harbour the illusion that their ancestors, who arrived from Iran on the shores of India several centuries ago, managed to keep their loins off limits to the local populace. A fallacy in itself due to the fact that Parsi landowners, given large portions of property by the British – had sex with their Indian servants. Their progeny were indoctrinated as Parsi through a patrilineal rule which allows the Parsi man to call his kid a Parsi. However, my Parsi mother was ex-communicated for marrying a Hindu, barred from entering the temple where she had been confirmed into the faith at puberty and her children (my brother and I) unrecognized as Parsi. Which is just as well, as the notion of the accidental refugee had already started before my birth.

Parsis are refugees. Those living in India believe they are Indian as much as those living in Canada believe they are Canadian. Freddie Mercury, a Parsi, was by that logic, a Zanzibarian. What does “coming from” a place where you have no history of rooting mean in your current context then? Are you really an African American if you’re Black in the States? Are you a British Bangladeshi if you’re Brown in the UK? Are you even Parsi, if your ancestors are Persian? Are you an Argentinian or Portuguese or Israeli if you have light skin, curly hair and don’t match a viewer’s idea of what an Indian ought to look like? If I was born in Shanghai, would I be Chinese? I have been asked for directions to places in Hebrew, Spanish, Turkish and Italian while walking through the streets of Reykjavik, Brussels, Istanbul and Milan respectively. One Beiruti shopkeeper was adamant I was really Lebanese and pulling a fast one on him when I told him I don’t understand Arabic.

Perhaps some people give away a stereotypical assessment to arrive at a judgment of where they’re from in its conventional questioning – for example, Satya Nadela is an Indian immigrant, Salma Hayek, a Latina of Mexican origin. Do they really “look” like anything specific? In the big jumble of global movements, where do they fit, what would they call themselves? What do I call myself?

A typical dialogue between me and a person I just met may go something like this:

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Person I’ve just met asks, “so, where do you come from?”

Me, “how long do you have?”

Also me, “I was born in Mumbai.”

Also me, “I have lived here and there.”

Also me, “I come from refugee stock, and if you ask me again in a few years, I may be just as obtuse then.”

Mixed heritage isn’t the sole factor which disallows me to conform. Having lived in different countries on different continents with distinctly different cultures isn’t the only reason I find myself unconsciously disengaging from someone who wants to box me into one idea. How do I explain that some of my heart’s shattered smithereens are at present hovering in the London air? That an Icelandic passport makes me long to show off the phoenetic ruddiness of the “Rs” of its language? That having a son who is also mixed has me truly believe we will all be “Beige” 50 years hence… a mash of non-ethnicities, determined by multi-DNA, our children able to come together in a wave of love and understanding. Schools will teach “Being Beige” as a history subject, countries will declare “Beige History Month” in honour of all mixed race people.

True belonging isn’t based on the man-made concept of a nation-state. Real identity is not hemmed in with where you were born or what language your mother speaks or how you look. It’s the spirit which moves you to say “I really love New York, so I came back to say ‘hey’” when the immigration officer asks you the reason for your visit (it made him crack a smile). It’s the call of your soul to sway to the beat of that distant drum, far away from the band in which you were told you HAD to sing. Real identity is accepting that your bones are yours, you take them, along with your backpack to anywhere you want to go, because you carry everything that makes who you are within them.