This article is about migration of human populations.
My father was born in India under the British Raj. When he was a child, his parents took him and his younger sister — my now deceased aunt — from Allahabad in Uttar Pradesh to Khulna in what was then the eastern wing of the nascent state of Pakistan.
I cannot claim to know their exact thoughts. My grandfather died when I was 4. My father talked about it infrequently during my formative years. When he did mention it, it was with an air of descriptiveness. Emotive expression isn't his style when he's discussing history, literature, linguistics or logic — a bit ironic since those are his passions. Of course he spared us the goriest parts of the migration: the ghost trains that crossed the borders, full of murdered corpses and the slaughter of neighbors by neighbors. Those details I was left to learn upon adolescence by sneaking into his sizable library.
As stoic as my father has been about his first migration, I know it affects him. What affects him more, however, is the second migration he made.
My father spent most of his boyhood and early youth in Khulna and Dhaka. He learned the Bangla language, in which he retains his fluency despite decades of sparse use. He found a job there, and then a wife — an émigré like him — and he and my mother overcame the challenges of raising a growing family on a meager salary with admirable aplomb. By the late 1960s, they had achieved a respectable, if delicately poised, balance in financial stability and societal integration.
The seeds of decades of disaffection, sown by dishonest governments and fomented by mistrustful leaders at all levels of society, were bound to sprout sooner or later. By 1969, they did. Sectarian tensions escalated, discrimination on the basis of ethnicity and mother tongue became the new norm. My father, despite speaking fluent Bangla and being an integrated member of society, was rather suddenly "the other". He recounts one vivid incident which laid bare to him the stark realities of the times.
As an employee of the national airline, he often flew between Dhaka and Karachi for work. Despite the tensions, he never made much of these travels. On one such trip, one of his long-time friends and colleagues joked with him in Dhaka "next time you return from Karachi, you'll need your passport and a visa".
My father loves Bengal, as much as his father loved India. However, he could read the signs, as I'm sure his father read a generation before him. Over the next several months, he packed up his belongings in Bengal, applied for a transfer to Karachi, and moved his young family from Dhaka to Karachi. As it turned out, he got his timing just right: the tumultuous Pakistani national election of 1970 started a precipitous series of events culminating in the emergence of Bangladesh as an independent state in 1971.
All this turmoil has had an affect on my father. "Patriotism", in the traditional sense of "my country, right or wrong", rings hollow with him. He is nevertheless a loyalist — a remarkable trait to carry throughout a life that has seen him being loyal to so many regimes. However, he has always drawn a clear distinction between the concepts of State and Government, and an even clearer one between Justice and Statehood.
As he spends his twilight years in his little apartment in Karachi, surrounded by his beloved books, watching yet another state crumble around him; this simple man — having outlived so many states and countless governments — is an inspiration to me to value Justice over all formal structures.
Now I spend my most vigorous years in the United States, having undergone my own migration as a (much!) younger man from Karachi to Chicago, confronted by the contemporary reality that I may yet be a persona non grata here in what I consider my home. I do not know what the future holds, but I have resolved to cap this familial tradition to #OneMigrationPerGeneration. As far as I can, I will resist attempts to be marginalized, cast out and "othered".
Just as my father painstakingly instilled it in me, I also resolve to teach my daughter the relative importance of Justice, Statehood and Government, so that the migration she embarks upon (hopefully a couple of decades from now but no sooner) is more fruitful and positively evocative for her than the ones undertaken by her forefathers.
