Is
it still home if it no longer exists? Reflecting on Goan history through the
memory of expulsion, the writer asks if it is ever possible to recover what was
lost.
My father sends me an image over
WhatsApp. “Tony took this photo,” he explains. “Do you recognize it?” I squint
to decipher what it is I’m supposed to see in the tiny picture on my phone. The
photograph, taken from the inside of a car, is mostly subsumed by the rear-view
mirror, with towering skyscrapers in the backdrop, reaching into the sun which
reflects blindingly off their mirror-like exteriors. “You see the small
building?” dad coaxes. And then I notice it, a miniscule boxy structure,
dwarfed by the high-rise modernity around it. “That’s where you grew up.”
Even now, Kuwait will catch me unawares.
I’ve been struck by how many times in the last few weeks mention of the place
has come up. While I was in Beirut last month for a conference, I met several
Arabs who, while not Kuwaiti, had been born in Kuwait, just like me, my sister,
and my cousins. We reminisced about our childhoods, our recollections of
school, the Hungry Bunny jingle on TV, and going to Entertainment City – the
amusement park. Pieces of the past come back to me from the dim fog of juvenile
memory. But it is also evident to me that more than twenty five years since the
Iraqi invasion and the ensuing Gulf War, there has been a collective recall of
that time and place in the contemporary moment. Note the January release of the
Indian film Airlift (2016), which
chronicles the Indian government’s evacuation of expatriates from Kuwait during
the invasion – the largest of its kind by a civilian air carrier in history. Sure,
it’s not the first time that 1990 has returned to remind us of its impact; Al Jazeera has often run stories about
that year, such as their series “Kuwait:
Class of 1990” (29 July, 2015). “The
occupation of Kuwait may have only lasted seven months, but the memory of
it remains strong, not least in the minds of the children of that conflict,”
the lead piece in the sequence muses.
Neither my family nor I had been in
Kuwait when the invasion occurred. My parents had decided to return to Goa the
year before. But in a matter of months, we would be reunited with the many Goan
families we had known in the Gulf state. The war had brought several people I
had grown up with ‘back’ to Goa. We were the lost generation: Goans our entire
lives, suddenly plunged into a foreign place called home. For some, there was
no getting over the culture shock. Like many other ‘Gulfie Goans’ of my
generation, I went abroad to continue my college education. My journey to California
in 1993 called for a change of planes in a country I thought I would never see
again. My non-Kuwaiti blood having disbarred me from being a citizen, I was
only permitted to view my birthplace from the airport. There was war damage
that was still being repaired.
Certainly, I felt a sense of saudades – that Portuguese word adopted
by Goans to explain feelings of loss, yearning, and nostalgia; a word that has
no equivalent in the English language. In his biographical introduction to his
wife Violet Dias Lannoy’s novel, Pears
from the Willow Tree (1989), Richard Lannoy refers to the writer and her
first husband, Behram, as members of the Lost Generation, the fledgling
postcolonial cohort that saw the promise of decolonization rent asunder by
“[t]he communal bloodshed of post-Independence India” (xv). For Dias Lannoy,
this shattered promise reverberated in the Indian annexation of Goa, much to
her shock as an activist-teacher who had worked with Gandhi. In her novel, the
Goan protagonist Seb struggles to find his place in the new country, only to
realize that it can never be his but not for lack of trying. The theme of loss
due to invasion is a recurrent theme in Goan history and that of its diaspora.
Much like the expulsion from Kuwait, many generations of Goans remember the
exodus from Burma when Japanese forces occupied the region during World War II.
My attempts to write about my childhood
in Kuwait often feel like they meet with failure – the lost words of a lost
generation. In this recovery effort, I am reminded of a photograph in my aunt’s
home in Miramar. “It is nowhere,” she responds puzzlingly to my query of the
image’s provenance. “We lost our albums during the invasion. I had no photos of
me and uncle. Your cousin recreated this one from two separate pictures.” The
collage is proof of the past, much like the image of my childhood home proves
it still exists. Even so, is it the place I remember?
From The Goan.
