My History
My ancestors were nomadic pastoralists. I’ve traced our history generations back to when we were Afghani warriors, who migrated over the centuries to Pakistan, to north-west India with trader caravans, and eventually to the Kutch desert, always with their loyal camels, goats and sheep. After being converted from Shakti worshippers to a Shia sect of Islam, they moved to certain Gujarati villages. My great-grandparents migrated from India to Kenya, one of the spiciest countries of East Africa. They started off as maize traders in the little town of Webuye in western Kenya. After years of hard work and growing their trading business, they moved to settle in green Eldoret. My parents migrated to the capital city Nairobi. I have definitely inherited that nomadic gene. I am most at home on the road, not knowing what lies ahead.
Growing up in Kenya as an Indian
This mixing pot, this land of many narratives, is where I spent my childhood, navigating the intricacies of a racially privileged minority to which my heart and soul did not belong. I never quite fit in as a ‘real’ Kenyan, nor was I able to fulfil the Kenyan-Indian stereotype that was elitist, racist, and aloof from the rest of the population.
I did not understand these divisions of race, wealth, and class. I was constantly questioning these inequalities and injustices that were obviously not right, but we were all accepting and taking advantage of – or suffering on the other end. The answers I received were not satisfactory. I was instructed to face the ‘real world’, lose my idealism, join the game of ‘man eat man.’ I couldn’t. I retreated into my own fantasy world of fairies and dragons, which I found in my books and in games with a few other fellow odd kids.
Free spirited as I was, I wandered my own way, drifting hither and thither… until eventually, years later as an official ‘adult’ I actually found my tribe. The artists, the activists, and the spiritually conscious were fellow oddballs, radicals and weirdos on the society’s margins. Race did not matter, gender did not matter, religion/lack thereof did not matter, background did not matter, ‘class’ did not matter, ethnicity did not matter. Only love mattered. They embraced me as a fellow soul. I found home.
Meeting the Sinners
Rewind a few years prior to when at 18, and I headed off to Montreal, Canada, for college. Imagine the culture shock, moving from a tiny religious Indian community in Africa to a big, bad and beautiful city in the West. My biggest shock honestly was that the average person walking the streets was white, not black – took me years to get my head around this. And here, in Montreal is where I met all the people I had been told were sinners – gay people, atheists, bastards, druggies, communists, anarchists, you name it. And…. lo and behold, these people weren’t so bad after all. In fact, they opened my eyes to their realities, and I learnt oh so much. Soon my best friends were all these labels that society has put on, often more enlightened and aware, folk who are really made of the same blood, bones, organs, and love as anyone else.
