Zia Ahmed November 10, 2005

Tags: immigrants nostalgia Partition

Do immigrants dream of electronic pasts?

href="/tag/nostalgia">nostalgia for a price instead of fake memories.

Tired of a dull existence, the protagonist in my story walks into a discount nostalgia shop. Unbeknownst to him, our hero is a direct descendant of Akbar Padishah. Predictably, things go horribly wrong: he ends up with a fatal dose of genetic nostalgia and starts thinking of himself as the Great Moghul.

To many middle-class Pakistanis whose parents or grandparents were migrants from India, the fictional venture of Nostalgia, Inc. holds much appeal. So what if we’re trapped in a tiresome existence defined by power failures, too many children, outrageous school fees, soapbox cars, one-unit bungalows and mediocre careers? Our grandparents were aristocrats, with mansions and platoons of servants. Every time we’re stuck in unairconditioned splendor in a Tariq Road traffic jam; every time we can’t budget in a Nathiagalli summer vacation; every time we cook daal instead of gosht because bakra meat is just a little too expensive, we can think of the palatial kothi that Dada Abba lived in and remind ourselves that Dadi Amma never had to trouble herself for even a glass of water. And that dose of inherited nostalgia brings a smile to chapped lips and gets us through yet another day of the drudgery that is life.

In what is rapidly becoming an immigrant family tradition, Cousin S__ recently took an Alex Haley-like tour of the old country in search of her roots. The family ancestors hail from a predictable variety of respected Indian locales: Lucknow, where they speak a brand of Awadhian Urdu so refined that purist Karachi-wallahs are put to shame; Meerut, where Mangal Pandey fired that fateful first shot; Delhi, city of Emperors and kebabs; Jaipur, where thakurs can get you bumped off for a variety of reasons. (OK, the only imagery I have of Rajasthan is from the film Lamhe; everything else is still valid.)

What she found was the nostalgia addict’s equivalent of speed: vast but ramshackle mansions, sprawling but unkempt gardens, and—most importantly—nostalgic descendants of the ancestors’ faithful servants. As if the impressive (albeit decrepit) kothis were insufficient proof of the ancestors’ lost glory, their former employees’ progeny provided fable-like memories through tears of joy and sorrow.

Wafadaar (faithful) servants, was the term my mother used in reverential tones when she described the scene to me. My polite but firm disdain for such parochial and classist notions as the faithfulness of servants was not well received. (Perhaps it was the bit about a dog being faithful, not a person.) Marxist leanings aside, my negativity towards faithful servants stemmed from two sources.

First, ever since the Lahore-Delhi bus service started, the lands of the ancestors have been in easy reach. Several aunts and uncles have performed similar pilgrimages in the past and have returned with suspiciously identical tales of weeping domestics.

Second, as my brother aptly pointed out, the only domestic help we have ever had has been more interested in purloining VCRs than furnishing nostalgia for our grandchildren.

The sobbing servants merely prop up the immigrant’s belief in his family’s former greatness. Such psychological ties are not uncommon. Even today, it is easy to find Southerners in America who look back fondly upon the pre-Civil War era when slavery was legal. Best exemplified in films like Gone With The Wind, such nostalgia tends to soften the ugly customs of the past. Thus, the practice of family servitude—where generations of one family served another—is remembered as being based on mutual respect and affection, something that made servants akin to family members.

Of course, the grandeur of days past is amplified over the decades, leaving one to wonder exactly how grand the ancestors were in the first place. Every muhajir family in Pakistan claims to have aristocratic roots. Some will even present evidence: dusty photographs or faded newspaper clippings of polo-playing grandees. But if every story of lost affluence is to be believed, then there is a great deal of very expensive but abandoned real estate in India, and millions of pining former domestic workers.

Nevertheless, nostalgia—inherited or personal, inflated or actual—remains a deep and poignant feature of the immigrant experience. I have often felt that my Phuppos’ tasteful but modest two-bedroom Karachi flat is occupied by tens of people: the two aunts themselves and the ghosts of Jaipur past. Even today, my brother remains convinced that the spare bathroom is actually inhabited by the ghost of Dada Abba’s chauffeur.

Nostalgia, Inc. ends with the hero being completely cured of his Akbar Padishah delusion. Except for healthy mustaches and an inexplicable contempt for Anarkali Bazaar, he resigns himself to a humdrum middle-class existence. If my subconscious is sending me a message through third-rate science fiction, I am unaware of it.