THE CHALDEAN CULTURAL CENTER'S Asian & Pacific Islander American History Month Interview Series (5 May 2022)

 

"Looking for Phoenicia Street, 1969" - INDIA CURRENTS (California - March 2016)

Beirut, then and now. A son looks for where his father had lived and finds other histories in a haunted present. 

It was the year my parents would marry in Kuwait. In the 1960s, as Goa was annexed by India and the creation of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, signalled the growth of the oil-based Middle Eastern economy, many Goans made their way to the Gulf states due to the rise of employment opportunities there. The American company my father would be employed by for two decades sent him to Lebanon as a trainee in 1969, shortly before my mother would join him in Kuwait, the country where my sister and I would be born.  

Nearly a half-century later, I try to locate the street on which my dad had worked and lived. He had always remembered Beirut fondly, a single twenty-something, then, out in the world on his own for the first time. As a friend and I make our way past the weekend crowd, enjoying views of the Mediterranean from the Corniche, the January sun glints off the windows of the towering Phoenician Hotel to our right. “Middle of the road as you start up on the slope”, my dad had instructed on WhatsApp, in response to my query of how far his office building might be in relation to the hotel that shares its name with the street he had called home. On our left, by the edge of Zaitunay Bay, the once glamorous St. George Hotel, now hollowed out, stands mutely as testament to Beirut’s heyday, its Golden Age. Previously damaged during the civil war, the hotel was the site of the 2005 car-bomb blast that killed then-Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. A large banner cuts across its otherwise silent façade like a scream: “Stop Solidere”, it implores, in reference to the company at the helm of redeveloping downtown Beirut, but clearly not without controversy. 

As I look for Phoenicia Street, its name recalling this country’s even more distant legendary past, I cannot help but think of that mythical bird reborn of the ashes, and wonder about Beirut’s future, its present so at odds with my father’s recollection of his youthful years in the city. In the midst of growing political instability, Syrians and Palestinians continue to seek refuge in Lebanon, these contemporary crises of displacement layered on already uncertain ground. ISIS, the Israeli occupation, and then the November 2015 bombing in southern Beirut that was eclipsed by news of the Paris attacks that same month. Refugee crises have fast become the most apparent political problem of this second decade of the 21^st century, especially as many nations, such as Australia, have balked at taking in the world’s homeless. Yet, ironically, Lebanon has been the shelter of its politically displaced neighbours while dealing with its own instability.

On another day, a young boy follows me as I walk over to Café Younis in Hamra where I was to meet some friends. When my father lived here, this was one of his haunts. He would frequent its cafes with friends he had made from all over the Middle East and other parts of the globe. “Syrian, Syrian”, the lad said, attempting to catch my attention. “Hungry”, he whispered, a shoeshine box in one hand. The vibrant multicultural city was once known as the Paris of the East. Now, its cosmopolitanness is bred from other causes. It is with these lines that the seminal postcolonial text Orientalism (1978) opens: “On a visit to Beirut during the terrible civil war of 1975-1976 a French journalist wrote regretfully of the gutted downtown that ‘it had once seemed to belong to . . . the Orient of Chateaubriand and Nerval.’ He was right about the place, of course, especially so far as a European was concerned. The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity…” Even as he exemplifies the Beirut of the past as the epitome of how the West imagines the East, the late Palestinian American writer Edward Said captures the ephemerality of a city lost, one still immersed in its own pain.

Of the impossibility of knowing these ghosts in the way only the haunted can, Said goes on to say, “Perhaps it seemed irrelevant that Orientals themselves had something at stake in the process, that even in the time of Chateaubriand and Nerval Orientals had lived there, and that now it was they who were suffering…” As if in illustration of Said’s observation of the juxtaposition of the fantastic past with the tumultuous present, the former somehow made more cognizable than the critical nature of reality, in the erstwhile Phoenician city of Tyre, millennia-old ruins stand monumentally in South Lebanon, almost rendering invisible the neighboring Palestinian refugee camp of modern provenance. 

In Beirut city, amidst the newly rising buildings, there are creative signs of dissent. A stencil of an Anonymous mask on one wall, flowers bursting out of a rifle held by a gunman on another. As I wonder how long these bold displays of public art might last, I continue to confer with my dad who is in Goa. “There was a coffee shop outside”, he advises via messenger, attempting to orientate me. But the company building seems to be non-existent. I ask a few locals. No one has heard of it. I look around to see newer buildings, their silhouettes sharply contrasting with the older architecture of the 60s and 70s, invariably pock-marked with evidence of the civil war. A few blocks further, the ravaged Holiday Inn of the infamous “battle of the hotels” looms inhospitably. “I saw it go up in flames from my balcony”, a Lebanese American friend later finds occasion to convey when we talk about my trip and memories of her childhood. “My landlady must be dead by now. She was in her 60s, then”, dad tells me on the phone when we speak. He had also tried to contact a Lebanese friend he knew to show me around, only to discover that the man and his family were long gone. I had found Phoenicia Street, but it was no longer 1969.

From India Currents. Another version also appears in The Goan.

"The Lost Generation: 1990" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (21 February 2016)

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.

"Some Other Country" - INDIA CURRENTS (California - June 2014)

Night had fallen on Melbourne by the time I had gotten through immigration and customs. I made my

way through the crowd of smiling people, some holding up “Welcome Home!” signs. For a moment, I entertained the possibility that at least one of them could be for me. In the arrivals area, I found a quiet spot and, fortunately, free wifi – always such a boon to itinerants. There was just enough power on my phone to send a quick message to let my folks know I had arrived safely. For a long while, I stood by my luggage cart and eyed the exit. I was not ready, just yet, to leave the neutral space of the airport, and step into terra incognita.

Sure, I had found myself in this same situation many times before. But it never ceases to feel daunting, that alienness of being on the precipice of starting life anew. En route to Australia, I broke my journey in Beirut. At immigration in Lebanon, I surmised that the officer was asking me if I spoke Arabic, but being unable to respond in that tongue, I apologized in English. “How come?” He interrogated. “You were born in Kuwait,” he said, jabbing his finger at the tell-tale information in my American passport.

Just a few weeks prior, the moustachioed official collecting departure cards at Bombay’s Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport – which will always be Sahar Airport to me from my childhood memories of transiting through there between Kuwait and Goa to see my grandmother – insisted on speaking to me in Hindi. As if to go with the nationalistically inclined name change of the airport, he questioned my inability to articulate myself fluently in “the mother tongue” that is completely unknown to my mother who was born and raised in East Africa. Waving my Overseas Citizenship of India card in my face, he chastised me, in Hindi, for not speaking the language of “your country.” I thought of the title of that novel, the one in which James Baldwin writes, “The aim of the dreamer, after all, is merely to go on dreaming and not to be molested by the world. His dreams are his protection against the world.” I thought of 1961, the year in which Goa ceased being Estado da Índia Portuguesa and, without the benefit of a local referendum to ascertain the will of its people, was handed over to India some fourteen years after a certain “Tryst with Destiny.” I signed my Portuguese name on the exit form, and departed the country that neither of my parents, nor I, had been born in.  

“It’s not just another country for you,” a friend remarked. “It’s a whole other continent.” Nonetheless, some things were immediately familiar, I thought to myself as I prepared the cash to pay the taxi

driver near the end of the ride from Melbourne’s Tullamarine Airport. For instance, there was the crowned head on the heavy currency – the paradoxically common royal visage on the coinage of the Commonwealth. I remember her well from those days of scrounging together my all too uncommon wealth as a student in London. And English is spoken here – that other imperial legacy. I thought of 1968, the year in which England withdrew the right of entry to British passport holders from its former colonies and how the lie was given to the concept of the Commonwealth. I thought of “Rivers of Blood,” Enoch Powell’s speech delivered that same year, in which he proclaimed, “Whatever drawbacks attended the immigrants arose not from the law or from public policy or from administration, but from those personal circumstances and accidents which cause, and always will cause, the fortunes and experience of one man to be different from another's.” The rising anti-immigrant sentiment resulted in the turning away of exiles, some of them South Asians from once British East Africa. Never mind that they were part of Britain’s history, or that they spoke “the same language.”

There was an awkward silence when the cab driver finally ended the call he had been on from the time he had picked me up. I had gathered from the phone conversation that he was Punjabi. “How long have you lived here?” I enquired. “Ten years.” After another protracted pause, he asked, “You’re here for work?” I nodded. “Yes. New job.” He said, “Good, good.” Leaning forward in my seat, I queried, “So, some years ago, there were those attacks, no? On Indian students… Some were murdered?” His head bobbed in assent. “But it is safe. You know… just mind your own business. You do your work and you go home after and everything will be fine.”

I thought about whose home this country really is and I thought of homelessness. I thought of 1869 and the ironically named Aboriginal Protection Act, which led to the Stolen Generations of state-abducted indigenous children. I thought of Doris Pilkington’s Follow the Rabbit Proof Fence, which was turned into a film and tells the story of just such Aboriginal children who had been taken away from their families. I thought of the earliest South Asians to come to this country, the so called “Afghans” who served as cameleers in the 1860s, transporting goods across Australia’s deserts - Muslim men who married into Aboriginal communities. I thought of the migrant who goes everywhere and belongs nowhere. “This is your stop,” the driver announced as he slowed down. “All the best!”

This article appears in the June 2014 issue of India Currents. A shorter version of it can be read in The Goan.

"The Difference between Deserts and Beaches: Sands of a Goan Childhood" - SEMANA DE CULTURA (Goa - 2013)

“Hindi! Hindi! HINDI!” he kept saying, his voice escalating with each utterance. The Arab lad was, at most, a year or two older than me. I was sitting on a chair, hands firmly gripping its sides, paralysed. I was not scared. Even now, I know that what I felt course through my four-year-old body, like a red hot fever, was shame. The boy ran out of the store when the adults entered. I felt a wave of relief wash over me as I saw my father come in with the proprietor. But something changed for me that day, and there was no going back. On the ride home, I did not utter a word of what had happened. I was different. And different was not good.

I would accompany my dad on his work visits to the little shops and grocery stores around Kuwait City, on occasion. He worked for an American company that would send him out to service cash registers around town. I would have to go along if I had the day off from school. There were times when it was fun: the shopkeepers would bestow a fistful of candy on me. Other times, my dad would instruct me to sit still while he finished his work. I would be bored out of my skull, waiting and waiting for him to wrap up the repairs. Playing outside in the scorching heat and away from parental supervision was out of the question. It was the 1970s. There was not then the plethora of digital paraphernalia to keep a middle class child occupied, and I was yet to discover the joy of books.

At Carmel School, I was one of hundreds of Goan children. It described itself as an Indian Catholic institution, and was run by nuns. My teachers were of various South Asian ethnicities, including Malayali, Singhalese, and Goan. The only non-subcontinental instructor I can recall having was my first Arabic teacher. Sure, there were other communities that made up Kuwait’s large international work force where the natives themselves were a minority. Paths crossed in personal interactions, but they were the exception. It could have been segregation by design, or sticking close to the familiarity of one’s own while trying to get by in a foreign land. Or both. 

Mom knew a Filipina seamstress whom she had sew a pink dress for my sister’s birthday, one year. When she came by to make alterations, she would fill my mother in on the latest goings on among her circle of friends. Some of them were maids in dire circumstances. They were looking for new employers, because they were unhappy with their current situation and could not stay in the country without a sponsor. Did my mom know if one of her Kuwaiti bosses was looking to hire, she would ask. There was the Yemeni caretaker responsible for the upkeep of the complex we lived in. He had a small room outside our building, which was one of a pair of twin blocks of flats. My parents once requested him to have me wait at his place after school because they would both be late from work. He sat me down on the rugs on the floor in his room among his friends, and I felt rather grown up as we sipped hot black tea from petite glasses in which sugar cubes, piled high, were slowly dissolving. From video footage my cousin shot on his visit to Kuwait last year, I was surprised to see that the flats in which I had spent my childhood still stood. They were dwarfed by tall skyscrapers of glass that blindingly reflected the sun.

Surrounded by Kuwait’s diversity, I knew I was Goan, because what else could I be ensconced as I was within a cocoon of community institutions in the tiny Arabian desert kingdom. A liberal dose of prejudice also helped craft my burgeoning cultural insularity. No, you’re not like Nabil (the boy who lived next door); yes, Nabil’s family are Christian, but they’re not Catholic and they’re Pakistani, I was instructed. Maria is Goan, true, but she’s a maid; yes, Filipinas are Catholics as well but, no, a Goan maid would be a better employee, I was taught to decipher. Mangaloreans were a tricky lot, I came to learn, what with their ‘Goan Catholic’ names and Konkani-speaking ability but, no, they were also not like us... Between being surrounded by Goan classmates at school and attending Catechism classes with some of those same little people at Holy Family Church on Fridays, which is when Sabbath services were held to coincide with the weekly holiday, being Goan in Kuwait was just about as commonplace as hating the fact that there was but a brief hour of cartoons to watch on television. 

There was only one channel. Because it carried programming in Arabic, English, and the occasional screening of a Bollywood film, there was no guarantee that even that hour of children’s programming was sacrosanct, as it was sometimes interrupted by the call to prayer or breaking news. Sandstorms periodically wreaked havoc on transmissions, delivering static instead of Tom and Jerry. Having waited all day for it, there was one time when I was so disappointed at my favourite show being suspended because of a signal failure that I attacked the television with a long-handled broomstick. It was a good thing that our miniscule black and white CRT set had a glass screen as thick as Sheldon Cooper’s sarcasm – both inescapably bad television.

That scarring moment in the shop when my difference was pointed out to me so unforgettably must have informed my realization that the hole at the top of my nose was something I was not supposed to have. I asked my father about it. Pointing to the space between my eyes, I whined, “Why do I have this? No one else does. I don’t want it.” He stopped working on the kitchen cabinet he was fixing, and smiled. “It’s so that if you got lost, and we have to describe to people how to find you, we’ll be able to say: ‘He’s the only boy in the entire world with a hole on his nose!’” No one else in the world, I mused... But my wonderment was short-lived, and my angst struck again with a vengeance. Looking at a photograph of myself, I saw the hole again as if for the first time. It was staring back at me – dead centre like a third eye between the other two. This time, I went to my mother.

She looked stricken at my query. “It’s because I was sewing when I was pregnant with you. They told me not to, but I did anyway. They said that for the first born I should go home to have the baby. There was an eclipse, and I pricked myself by accident.” I took in this information with horror. “You mean you poked me with a needle while I was still inside of you?” I nearly shouted in disbelief. From the look in her eyes, I realized my mother had never revealed this incident to anyone else before. 

It took me many years to understand what the guilt I saw on my mother’s face was really about – why she had forced herself to believe it was the eclipse that had caused me to be marked. What home would she have chosen to have her first born? Her father had died in Merces, and her mother in Mombasa. In fact, my grandfather had returned to Goa, knowing that his end was near. He brought his youngest, my mother, with him. The British Africa she was born in had now been relegated to the chapters of colonial history, and having taken up my father’s citizenship after they were married in Kuwait, she was no longer a Kenyan national. And so her children would be born not in her place of birth, nor in Goa where their father was from, but in yet another alien land.

Often unintentionally, my parents recreated the Goa they knew in our modest flat in Kuwait. An indescribable smell accosted my olfactory sense, one day, as I walked in the door after having been dropped off by the school bus. “What is that?” I enquired of my parents, my nose crinkling at the unfamiliar stench. “Rice. Goa rice,” they said proudly, my mother ladling a spoon of the characteristically husk-stained grains onto a plate for me. Not even that combined look of hurt and horror – like they had been hit in the gut – could compete with my revulsion. “I don’t want any!” I said before turning on my heel. My parents let their firstborn brat be hungry that afternoon in retribution for his cultural betrayal. Even now, when I picture Goa, it is as the verdant paddy rice fields tended by my grandmother in her village in Aldona, a breeze caressing the tops of grain-laden stems that sway as stark white egrets take wing. It makes it all the more peculiar why I still have no palate for rice and fish curry – that staple diet of my ancestors.

It is a mystery to me how my folks came into possession of paddy rice so far away from its origin. But my guess would be that they acquired it from one of those many ‘uncles’ whom I came to see as part of my extended family. Mostly in working class professions, they might have been from my father’s village, or friends of friends. There were ‘shippies,’ or tarvoti, like Uncle John who travelled frequently between Goa, Kuwait, and other places, stopping by our home while in transit to drop off some contraband, rice included I suppose. John, who was very fond of me, stands out in my mind as a kind man who bore more than a passing resemblance to the then Crown Prince. Sheikh Saad of the Al-Sabah dynasty, rumour had it, was of mixed race birth. My parents tried to explain to me that I would no longer see John after we went to visit him in the hospital after many weeks of him having not come by. I could tell he was in pain though he put on a bright smile when he saw me. Whenever I saw Prince Saad on the news, thereafter, I secretly hoped that it was really John who had gone on to assume his alter ego full time. But I could not square away seeing his mother, clad in black and tearful, being commiserated with by my parents on the steps outside Holy Family.  

My family was part of the Kuwait Goans Association whose activities included charitable work and annual events, like the Christmas shindig. More informally, there were house parties and picnics. Of the latter, one that sticks out was an excursion that involved a long ride by bus. It was hot and the flies were merciless, but there was much merriment as songs were sung, sandwiches divvied up, and cups of cola passed around into which had been swirled miniscule amounts of precious bootleg liquor. When we arrived at our destination, I was grateful for the opportunity to finally stretch my legs. The sight that greeted me was less welcome. For as far I could see, there was nothing but sand. “What is this?” I interrogated, quite incredulous that this wasteland could be any one’s idea for a good place to have a picnic. “This is Kuwait,” my father responded cryptically. I had long given up on trying to understand why adults could never give it to you straight (except for when you had done something wrong and got caught, and then there was no stopping their verbosity...). 

“Look, look!” another man standing nearby exclaimed. A few others came over, further restricting my view of what they were looking at beyond the dunes. “Ah, yes,” someone said. “Bedouins.” Though I craned my neck, I saw nothing. As I imagine it now, here were two tribes regarding each other from across the desert sand: the natives of Kuwait on one end, the Goan migrants on the other. “The day will come when all this will be a city,” speculated one of the onlookers, breaking the silence. “Our children will drive on the roads they build through here,” a woman added. Another pregnant pause followed as I wondered if the adults were experiencing a collective mirage. Slowly, people peeled away and busied themselves with setting up for the picnic: tents, food, games, and more. It ended up being a much better time than I had expected.

A picnic is also what I recollect as my first memory of Goa at the tail end of the seventies. I want to say it was on my first visit, but my mother tells me she had brought me to Goa as an infant, previously. No matter – this was my first memory of a place that I had heard so much of, but never knew, so it might as well have been my first time. I remember that family outing to the beach, with several of our relatives, so well, because I saw a familiar figure lounging on the sand. Long blond locks, blue eyes, and a loin cloth. I was awestruck. “Mom, mom!” I gushed. “It’s Jesus!” My mother, simultaneously embarrassed and amused, joined the party in giggling as she shushed me. The young hippie who was in earshot laughed too. I was puzzled about what all the fuss was over.

***

Just before I turned nine, my parents sent me to St. Peter’s School in the hills of Panchgani, Maharashtra. It had been the European Boys School, formerly. Attending the institution was my first experience of an India outside Goa. Having planned an eventual return to their roots, my parents had probably thought it prudent to culturally acclimate their son beforehand. But the boarding school was trapped in its own post-Independence identity crisis. It needed to be British enough to retain the caché of elitism that attracted the well-heeled to have their children schooled there, but desi enough to cater to the nostalgic requirements of parents from the diaspora. At the risk of making the comparison, I cannot help but ponder if the Zanzibar-born Parsi rock star Freddie Mercury, who also went to St. Peter’s, felt just as out of place there as I did. 

My school holidays were spent either in Kuwait, or with my grandmother in Aldona. I completed high school in Goa in 1990, joining my family who, by then, had repatriated from Kuwait. Other than when they had been on vacation, this was their first time back as fulltime residents after leaving Goa

in the sixties, shortly upon the transfer of power of the enclave from Portugal to India. The discovery of oil in the Middle East, during that same period, had led to a large demand for foreign labour to transform the various emirates into modern urban oases. Goans were among those who heeded the call in large numbers. About a year after my parents returned voluntarily, the Iraq invasion of Kuwait 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 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. In the window, looking out onto Kuwait, I caught a reflection of the t-shirt I had decided to wear for the trip. It said GOA.

While in college in California, I visited a thrift shop where I rummaged through the used books section and found a copy of The Rape of Kuwait. I paid twenty five cents for the book – diminutive in size despite its heavy title. In one go, I consumed it in its entirety: tales of the marauding invaders who pulled babies out of incubators and who plundered the land of my beginnings with all the restraint of comic book villains, until the gallant Americans came to the rescue. Reading about the atrocities, I felt something course through my teenaged body that I had never felt before – the red hot fever of nationalism. Jean Sasson’s hastily written book, I learned later, was part of a huge public relations effort that had been orchestrated to drum up support for the Persian Gulf War in the United States and around the world. I believe I ended up donating the book back to the thrift shop.

Last year, I was awarded a doctoral degree by the University of London for my thesis on Goan characters in postcolonial and diasporic fiction about displacement. My academic pursuit, clearly, has mirrored my personal trajectory and that of my family’s. Often, I think about the confrontation from my childhood in that shop in Kuwait and of the shame I felt that day. I mull over whether that boy might still be where I left him. As for the hole on the bridge of my nose – no bigger than a grain of sand – it is still there but, now, I enjoy it because it is different.

Semana de Cultura (2013) is currently only available in print. This piece also appears in the Winter 2015 issue of Mizna, and an excerpt can be read in The Goan.