Immigrant stories

Consider this:

As a student in America, where I was considering a Ph.D. in mathematics and a job in finance, I would read 200-word stories buried in the back pages of newspapers. With so few words, speaking of events so large, there was a powerful sense of dissonance. I traveled to Congo, at age 22, on a one-way ticket, without a job or any promise of publication, with only a little money in my pocket and a conviction that what I would witness should be news.

Impressive, right?

The person who bought himself a one-way ticket to Congo, at age 22, was Anjan Sundaram.  That excerpt is from this blog-post in 2014.

For those who are from my part of the old country, the name Sundaram immediately suggests that his people hail from the same part of the country.  My excitement is always multiplied a gazillion times over when my people take the roads less traveled and accomplish a lot.  Sundaram wrote in 2014:

News organizations tell us that immersive reporting is prohibitively expensive. But the money is there; it’s just often misallocated on expensive trips for correspondents. Even as I was struggling to justify costs for a new round of reporting in Congo, I watched teams of correspondents stay in $300-per-night hotels, spending in one night what I would in two months. And they missed the story.

Parachuting in with little context, and with a dozen other countries to cover, they stayed for the vote but left before the results were announced. A battle broke out in Kinshasa after they left, and I found myself hiding in an old margarine factory, relaying news to the world, including reports to this newspaper.

Sundaram has accomplished a lot over the seven years.  He has authored a poignant and honest memoir essay in The New York Review of Books.  It is a wonderful essay about immigration, and his relationship with his father.  Read it in full; will be worth your time.

One piece of information in his essay grabbed my attention, even though it is mentioned only in passing:

Two winters ago, I paid a visit back to my ancestral village, at the southern tip of India. My great-grandfather’s home there was left to me, on a small plot of land.

An ancestral village at the southern tip of India.  I wonder how far away that is from Pattamadai or Sengottai.

Rare is an immigrant who completely forgets the old country and the old ancestral village.  Most of us remember.  It almost haunts us.  It is also a constant reminder of how far we have traveled, and what we have given up in order to live elsewhere.  Choices we make in plenty to be where we are, but there is always that umbilical cord that ties us to the village far, far, far away.

Sundaram writes:

“Who am I becoming?”

An immigrant inevitably asks this question.

It is one of the toughest questions ever.