The New Nomads by Felix Marquardt

Author:Felix Marquardt [Marquardt, Felix]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-07-08T00:00:00+00:00

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Another country that fared better than expected on the Youthonomics index was India. The nation’s growth isn’t as impressive as China’s, and the rise of Hindu nationalism is tainting the conversation on immigration: the Citizenship Bill of 2016, which the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) sought to turn into law in 2019, offers immigrants from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh a path to Indian citizenship, as long as they are not Muslim. Still, in an unprecedented development, the country is seeing the children of Indians who migrated to the US, Australia and the Gulf countries return.4

Yassir, one such son of Indian emigrants, was born in Cleveland and grew up in Los Angeles – where for many years he introduced himself as a ‘Cleveland Indian’ in a facetious nod to the baseball team. When Yassir was ten, the family took him to India, and he hated everything about it. ‘I didn’t understand it. I thought it was dirty. It smelled. It was disgusting. I was your typical Californian brat coming from LA, where everything is sparkling clean. Suddenly, I was in a place without running water. I was like, “How do you not have a shower? How do you not have toilet paper? How do you not have all these things that are so basic and elementary?”’ He couldn’t understand why his parents would take him to such a terrible place and vowed never to return.

His parents worked tirelessly throughout Yassir’s childhood and adolescence. Amir, his dad, was an architect. His mother Shahoor had grown up with servants and had been cast to star in what became a Bollywood classic, before being forced to marry Amir and migrate to the US. For her, having to work at all, let alone as a cleaning lady, as she did, was a sobering experience. As a result, Yassir, his sister Lia and brother Imraan were left to their own devices. Imraan kept getting into trouble and was a constant source of worry for the family. Yassir struggled through high school and barely got accepted into the University of California Santa Barbara, where he studied organic chemistry with the sinking feeling that it ‘wasn’t for me’. It was during his second year that he reluctantly agreed to return to India for a family reunion.

‘It was like I was coming home,’ Yassir recalls. ‘All my dreadful memories of coming as a kid vanished at once. I was so grateful to have come back. One night, it was December 1997, the whole family was gathered in Pune for a party in a fancy hotel. At one point, I was standing outside smoking, when through the frame of the doorway, I saw my grandmother Bibijune, the family’s warm-hearted matriarch, an extraordinary lady. She was sitting in the middle of a hundred people in a halo, and everyone was taking pictures of her… I felt I was getting a glimpse of her aura. It’s hard to explain, but through this vision of her, I suddenly felt awake and connected to the entire universe.

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