When we lose parents and grandparents, it’s up to us to continue their stories

Before I knew who I was, I knew I was an immigrant. As long as I can remember, before I had a solid sense of self, passions, even personality, my parents would explain my brown skin. They told me that we hailed from pre-partition India and that my great-grandparents emigrated from there to Kenya and Uganda. In the mid-1960s, when those east African countries were gaining independence from British rule, my grandparents decided to settle in England, the place we have remained since.

They told me where I was from because they knew other people would ask. I had the facts and the lineage so I could explain away my name and existence as a person who looked different from most of those who surrounded me. Yet, as I grew older and lived with the increasingly grating, constant experience of having to tell that story of myself to everyone from taxi drivers to schoolteachers, I wanted to ask why. Why did my family move continents twice in two generations? Why was I here, an immigrant? 

It seemed like a simple enough question, but I could never get an answer. My parents were children when they came to Britain and it was something they never had time to ask their mothers and fathers. Instead, they lived in the shadow of people hustling to make a living in a foreign place filled with the horrors of prejudice and racism. As they got older and eventually met each other, they followed the same path as my grandparents: always moving forwards, never looking back. 

Read the essay in Hyphen.

[This piece was published on 07/05/25]