When we lose parents and grandparents, it’s up to us to continue their stories
In the face of familial loss, I plotted out what little of the family history I knew and found myself filling in the gaps with my imagination
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Before I knew who I was, I knew I was an immigrant. As long as I can remember, before I had a solid sense of self, passions, even personality, my parents would explain my brown skin. They told me that we hailed from pre-partition India and that my great-grandparents emigrated from there to Kenya and Uganda. In the mid-1960s, when those east African countries were gaining independence from British rule, my grandparents decided to settle in England, the place we have remained since.
They told me where I was from because they knew other people would ask. I had the facts and the lineage so I could explain away my name and existence as a person who looked different from most of those who surrounded me. Yet, as I grew older and lived with the increasingly grating, constant experience of having to tell that story of myself to everyone from taxi drivers to schoolteachers, I wanted to ask why. Why did my family move continents twice in two generations? Why was I here, an immigrant?
It seemed like a simple enough question, but I could never get an answer. My parents were children when they came to Britain and it was something they never had time to ask their mothers and fathers. Instead, they lived in the shadow of people hustling to make a living in a foreign place filled with the horrors of prejudice and racism. As they got older and eventually met each other, they followed the same path as my grandparents: always moving forwards, never looking back.
Once I came along — the first generation to be born in England — I had the privilege and distance to slow down and cautiously begin to question. Yet by the time I did, both of my father’s parents had died and so had my maternal grandmother. The only person left to carry our history was my mum’s dad, whose house I would go to every Monday night for dinner.
At 18, sitting across from him one freezing Monday in January 2012, I watched as he patiently mopped up the last of his dal with a shred of roti. He sat back, satisfied, and I asked him to tell me the story of why they moved all those years ago. “Oh, you know,” he paused to burp. “Better life. We thought it would be a better life.” And was it, I asked. “Don’t worry about that. You just get a good job, earn good money and find a nice wife.” He pushed back his chair and pottered away to switch on the TV.
Whenever I asked again, the answer was always a variation of the same thing: they went in search of a better life and no one knew if they managed to find it. My mum would chuckle at his evasion. Then, a year later, on 3 August 2013, she died of cancer. She had been battling with her illness for the past four years and, with her loss, my sense of the unknown became even more insistent. I wished I had taken the time to ask her more about her experience in this country, what her hopes and wishes had been. But it was too late. I would have given anything for one last conversation.
I felt that loud silence as I navigated my grief and tried to establish a sense of adulthood, vowing to live as much as I could in the present, to do my mum justice by carrying on. I moved forwards and tried not to look back — it was too painful.
I got that good job, as a writer, and was on my way to finding that nice wife my grandad wanted for me when he died in 2021. He was 90, but his death still came as a shock. It felt like the entire family line was being wiped out and now, as those old unanswered questions came flooding back, there was no one left to ask. I cried, got angry, bargained and refused to reach a mute acceptance. There must be a way to know why I was where I was, in this country rather than India, Kenya or Uganda. There had to be a reason.
I turned to writing. Jotting down my questions, plotting out what little of the family history I knew, I started to see a narrative emerge and I found myself filling in the gaps with my imagination. Rather than moving forwards as I had been for the past decade, I was writing my way back into history.
The more I wrote, the more I saw it as an empowering act and I eventually ended up with a book – a novel called A Person Is a Prayer, which was based on truth but full of fiction. It was the culmination of a realisation: that sometimes the only thing you can do when you don’t have the answers is to make them up, to fashion your own identity and family story rather than feel stuck always asking why.
I imagined the hope my grandparents must have felt when they decided to move continents and how that sense of optimism would have developed in their children as they faced the reality of living in a racist society. I imagined how the search for happiness changed through generations and a transforming world.
The act of imagining brought me closer to the people I had lost and helped me come to terms with the fact that even though they were irretrievably gone — sometimes in the throes of painful, horrifying illnesses — their lives were worthwhile and filled with as much joy as there was trauma. If I could imagine it, surely their reality must have been far richer and more detailed.
To have answers, rather than imagine, is a privilege. For families like mine and so many others, driven to move across uncertain waters, there often is no paper trail to document their journey and oral histories are frequently silenced. Instead, it’s up to us who remain to make their story anew, to continue living our lives in the search for meaning. Maybe it was a gift that my grandfather evaded my questions or that my parents never asked their own. They knew it was a story I had to come up with myself.
A Person is a Prayer is out now.
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