Roots in a Faraway Land

Home.

For most people, the word evokes memories of where they grew up or where they live now, but for me, something completely different comes to mind when I hear it.

To me, home is a place thousands of miles away, in a completely different country. It’s a place I've spent no more than a few weeks in, but as strange as it may sound, it’s a place I feel an immense connection to nonetheless.

For me, home is Punjab, a small state in northern India, where lush green fields of wheat and forests of sugar cane blanket the countryside.

It’s a place where my ancestors fought with courage against the armies of Alexander the Great and other conquers who have tried to invade it time and time again.

It’s a land in which countless revolutionaries have taken birth, standing up for what’s right in an unjust world.

It’s a place where a magnificent golden temple sits the middle of a bustling and crowded city, like a beautiful lotus rising from a swamp.

It’s the land of poets and saints, of prophets and warriors, where five rivers flow and feed the fertile soil that in turn feeds a nation.

It’s a place where you are awoken each morning by prayers of multiple faiths, blaring on outdated loudspeakers.

It’s a place where the tea is sweet, the carrots are red, and the sky a blue that I have never quite seen anywhere else in the world.

It’s a place where I feel an immense connection while walking through the narrow and winding brick roads in my ancestral village, knowing that generations of my family also walked these same streets.

It’s where I stop at a small shop to buy a drink and look into the eyes of the owner, realizing that our fathers likely made the same transaction decades ago, as did their fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers before them.

It’s a place where tradition meets modernity; where wild cows roam the parking lots of towering skyscrapers; where expensive vehicles share the road with carts pulled by horses and oxen.

It’s a place of contradictions, where you’ll be swarmed by children begging for food or money as you exit a luxury shopping mall.

It’s a place that despite the difficulties its people may be facing, they’ll always greet you with a warm smile and a hearty laugh. It’s a place where love reigns supreme.

It’s also a place which my parents left in search of a better life, forced to abandon all they knew so my siblings and I could grow up with more than they did. It’s a place that they loved yet sacrificed, all for the hope of a brighter future for their children.

It’s a place I heard spoken about fondly by my parents almost daily while I was growing up, the love and longing in their voices evident to me even as a child.

It’s the place of which I was forced to learn to read, write and speak the language, with great resentment as a child, but something I am profoundly thankful for as an adult.

As human beings, we all long for a sense of belonging. We want to feel as though we're part of something bigger and desperately want to understand our place in the world. Our lives are an immense tangle of activities, relationships, jobs and commitments. Searching for belonging in these areas is not only difficult, but also frustrating. Many of us come up empty-handed, and it’s not for lack of effort.

But, what if we’ve all been looking in the wrong place? What if the answer to our quest is hidden not where we are, but where we come from? Rumi once said,

“Maybe you are searching among the branches, for what only appears in the roots.”

My roots are in a place of which I’m not even a citizen. Despite this, no matter where life takes me, no matter what I do and what I become, the essence of this land will always flow through my veins. It’s a part that’s so vital to my identity that if you were somehow able to take it out of me, I wouldn’t be recognizable to myself and those who know me best. In short, it's a part of me so sacred that I will never be able to give justice to it with mere words, no matter how long I write.

My roots are in a faraway land called Punjab, and that’s why it will forever be what comes to mind when I think of home.