In 2014, I covered Modi’s election out of the temple town of Varanasi, curled around the Ganges. I had grown up as a member of that English-speaking elite in India. I had lived among people who exercised a tremendous amount of economic and political power over a country they lived at a tremendous distance from. The precarity of their position had frightened me when I moved back to India after college in the United States. I felt I was living among people awaiting destruction. All my books dealt with how this class of person had made itself vulnerable in the new India. When Modi appeared on the horizon, I felt he represented a valid critique of the world he meant to supplant, without necessarily being the agent of a better one.
Here’s an uncomfortable question: Did my own uncertainty about belonging in India—as the illegitimate son of a Pakistani, a gay man, a westernized product of a westernized elite—contribute to my need to make common cause with a Hindu majority whose passions I did not share?
My time in India as an adult was spent almost entirely trying to make up for the cultural and linguistic gaps of a colonial childhood. I learned Hindi and Urdu well enough to translate a major short-story writer into English. I devoted hours every day to learning Sanskrit, the language of classical India. I traveled widely, trying to overcome the discomfort I felt in small-town and rural India. I eschewed sexuality as a basis for identity out of fear that it would leave me further isolated in my country. I killed off aspects of myself—my knowledge of French, my ease in the world beyond, not just in the West, but in places like Turkey, Syria, and Iran, where my first book was set—in order to better fit back into Indian life. I said earlier that one’s relationship to one’s country ought to be instinctive, effortless, something one might even take for granted. My relationship with India was anything but.
In the end, none of it mattered. In August, I received a letter warning me of the Home Ministry’s intention to revoke my Overseas Citizenship of India. A few months later, in November—after the Ministry’s spokeswoman canceled my OCI on Twitter, in response to a report in the Indian press—I walked over to the Indian Consulate, on East 65th Street, and handed in the one document that had allowed me to live and work in India.
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I was done. My mother, operating out of that old Indian sense of prestige and influence, had thought we might be able to finagle a tourist visa. Five years on, it is yet to materialize.
“Exile is a writer’s natural state,” the writer Jeet Thayil told the Indian press when asked about what the Indian government had done to me. It is a romantic idea, bringing to mind so many writers and painters, from James, Nabokov, and Joyce to Goya, Chagall, and Dalí, who were fed as artists by the experience—now imposed, now voluntary—of not being able to return home. But for each of these artists, there were countless more who lacked the inner resources needed to be away from their friends and family—not to say, their material—for so long. For them, exile is sterile. They lived away, and yearned for home, finding comfort in expatriate communities, slowly losing touch with their homeland, dying as artists.
I did not know which category I fell into, but as the reality of not being able to go home set in, an unexpected emotion crept over me. I felt relief. The burden of trying to fit into India, of forever apologizing for its shortcomings, apologizing for my own Westernization, was suddenly lifted from me. The West, in turn, was no longer some dirty secret that I could enjoy only at the detriment of the “real” India. It was all I had. I was home.
The only analogous experience to the lightness I felt upon losing my country was borne in on me (no less strangely) soon after my father was killed. He had died a hero’s death—like the old Thane of Cawdor in Macbeth, where, “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it”—and he was mourned publicly by the likes of Hillary Clinton and Pope Benedict, who said a prayer for him in the Sistine Chapel. I felt the pressure to mourn him as others were mourning him, but, in my life, he had only ever been a heavy scolding presence. I feared his judgment, here related to my work, there to my sexuality, but now, upon his death, I felt the strain of having to see him as others saw him.
The writer V. S. Naipaul was my mentor and a friend in those days. We were at his house in Wiltshire soon after my father’s assassination. He asked me how I was feeling. I began speaking of my father in a way that must have struck him as false, because he stopped me dead.
“But your father,” he said, “was your great enemy, so you must also be relieved that he’s dead.” It was the kind of absolution only a writer can offer. I had tried so hard to be my father’s son, suppressed whole sides of my personality, only to run into futility, that it was a relief to no longer have to try. He was gone, and I was free.
India was not an estranged parent, but the experience of striving to belong in a place where one is destined to always feel a fraud was not dissimilar. My husband, whom I met in New York the summer of 2014, after the election that brought Modi to power, remembers how strenuous my assertions of belonging were at the time. The more I stressed my Indian-ness, the more he doubted it was real. I struck him as someone trying too hard. In the first years of our marriage, India was like a mistress. I would spend several weeks a year there, guilty about living away. But even at the best of times, India asserted belonging through a pact of mutual hardship. It was the opposite of America: it offered nothing, not opportunity, not comfort, not recognition. Endurance was the mark of true belonging. The perversity of these demands must have been hard on my husband. Not just my absences, but my need to forever balance two (if not three) societies in my head. I remember him asking me once to “unpack”—to not live as if my life in America were provisional.
Then suddenly one day I woke up to find it was the only life I had. Without it, I would have been on a one-way flight to Britain, where I had been born, but had no life to speak of. Once India closed behind me in the way that it did, the legal reality of not being able to go back merging with the hatred of Modi’s supporters, I felt strangely free. I no longer had to make India seem better than it was (the bad air, the traffic), and the need no longer to lie—truth, in a word—felt like sustenance. So too did the return of my old curiosities. I could revel in my love of the English language without fearing that I was somehow letting down the side.
This excerpt from Aatish Taseer’s ‘A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile’ has been published with permission from HarperCollins India.