#43 - to be rooted
#43 - to be rooted
reflections on a sprawling ancestry
The lights in our bedroom flickered on and off half a dozen times. It happened just a few hours after my dad sent our family WhatsApp group a message to let us know that my Ba, my 94 year old paternal grandmother, and last ‘living’ grandparent, had been taken to the ER for water retention. Water retention, I learned, is common amongst those with a chronic heart condition, and potentially fatal depending on how far up the body it travels.
‘Is it serious?,’ I inquired.
‘It’s serious,’ he responded frankly.
I didn’t know if the flickering lights had meant she had transitioned, if her spirit was caught between realms negotiating staying or going, or if our long and persevering lineage was calling her home. I wasn’t sure what the message was, but I knew it was a message.
I tried to recall the last time I saw Ba, but I couldn’t - it had been that long. The calendar app on my phone has no recorded memory and my own was failing me. Did I stop in London on the way to Mumbai in 2015? How has it been that long? I had always childishly assumed she would live at least forever.
In the early pandemic, Ba’s brood - her seven children and their spouses, her 21 grandchildren, and nearly 20 great grandchildren miraculously made it on Zoom together. A first for us, and likely the closest we will all get to sharing a room together. ‘Let’s clap for Ba,’ my cousin Neal suggested. And so we did, quietly realizing our intertwined fates and the waves of life that have rippled from the cradle of her womb.
There is little evidence that I really know Ba. During my upbringing, flying a family of five to London was a luxury we could infrequently afford. Over the years, she visited Toronto a handful of times; once with my Bapuji - my paternal grandfather, who passed away over two decades ago on Valentines Day from complications related to diabetes. Once when my parents guru was visiting our house to bless the opening of a temple in our basement and once when my older sister was getting married. But Toronto was far and cold, and she openly resented that we lived here.
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Between the distance, the limited time spent together, and my sad Gujarati, our knowledge of each other is plainly that we come from one another. Our names will be braided together in archives long after we both perish and that in itself feels like something. My mom always clenches and shakes her fist when she talks about Ba, ‘she’s a tough and strong lady.’ Mom reminds us about how Ba would ride London buses alone and widowed in her sari to appointments, with only a few words of English to spare. That was awhile ago though, before walking made her legs feel like they were on fire.
We have a series of photos of Ba sitting on a throne, with her family mushroomed around her. She has never been shy to be a matriarch and to let you know that the way you pinch the Ghughra is all wrong and that the sweetened almond meal inside will fall out while frying. Her recipe for foule - a common Sudanese meal, is a Sunday fixture in our house and the last remaining artifact of migration.
While sitting beside her at Sakonis in Wembley almost a decade ago, a no-frills Indian vegetarian restaurant with unquestionably good chili paneer and onion bhajiya’s, she urged me to speak to her, in any mishmash of Gujarati and Hindi I could muster. The embarrassment of my inabilities brought me to silence.
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There is a line I wrote in the audio experience that accompanied Higher Hair - the performance that I created this past weekend that invited you into a supernatural spa to contemplate the ancestral stories held in your hair, while I played and stroked yours into a soft surrender - which reflects on the inherent power that arises within from being connected to a constellation much bigger than you could or should ever grasp. As the track played nearly 45 times over the weekend, I thought about all the ways in which this knowing has escaped me.
My family traded being anchored to a land for movement; from India to East Africa, East Africa to London, and London to Toronto. Two moves by choice, one by force. Three times removed, three times under British colonial rule, three grandparents miles away. Physical threads that sink the heel into the soil were severed, and that has meant dealing with the fallout of bloody wounds and acquiring a taste for exploring and seeking.
On new lands, lands that do not belong to you, lands not tailored to your organisms ecology, lands that use you as a pawn of foreign trade, there is a cost to always being aware of yourself. There is a marked difference in recognizing yourself as a speckled bird with a frayed wing flying in a blue sky, rather than as part of the morning milieu. Even if you don’t catch the difference, a tax is paid.
There is a cost to the body too, which will overwork and stretch and tire itself to locate physical safety in an unfamiliar place and exercise a feisty will to survive like a single mother left stranded with a flock. It will cut off the bigness and unknownness of dreaming and possibility and imagination to keep the body small, predictable and therefore safe.
And inside the homes of vibrating bodies made to always be aware of itself on new lands, the carnage from severing, from distancing itself from an ancestry that yearns for closeness, will be seen and felt in violent ways. The disconnection from the constellation may widen.
And yet, somewhere along an ever-present awareness, a leaving and returning to the body in hard and repetitive cycles, you will be offered the choice to deconstruct it all. You will discover an internal land that is equally meaningful and reroute a persevering lineage that will still find its way to its origin. Under the enduring sting of severing, and within the discomfort of no longer camouflaging, there will be a kind of written freedom too. And you will live in that odd tension, and it may never be resolved.
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‘For so long, it has been so painful to be here,’ my friend S tells me, gesturing to this realm, as she shares how her long-time disdain towards the colours red and orange - the colours of the Muladhara, the root chakra, the home of earth and Kundalini energy - changed one day into fervent affinity. We talk about all the places we have lived instead of here: a purple floating fantasy above our crown; the packaged frameworks of impact, success, goodness; the dissection of other people’s stories, paths and way; the towards and eventually. Why feeling anchored has been so elusive and so difficult to grasp feels less of a mystery but I now see a way through.
‘I see layers of ropes’ my Reiki practitioner tells me during a session two weeks ago. ‘I can’t see under them.’ Later, she tells me they are etheric cords connecting my body to past family members, to ancestors seeking resolution through me. ‘They are depleting you, rather than nourishing you,’ she suggests. S advises that the wisest ancestors are those a few generations back - those who have processed millennia of existence into wisdom. More recent ancestors are often still in process. I am reminded that sometimes love is also letting go when you can’t hold space for liberation. Even those who are no longer here. Even those you’ve never met.
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Ba says she has had a good life when my parents speak to her on the phone. I don’t know if that means she is yielding to her frailty, or simply confronting what this moment could suggest. I wouldn’t be surprised if she lived another decade.
In this lifetime, we were not physically connected; we did not share holidays, graduations or Sunday dinners, and she knows few details of my life, but my story will always live inside of hers. To tell my story is to tell our story. And our story spiritually chose to bloom like a white lotus and stretch its petals across Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and the Middle East, leaving traces of our consciousness across the globe.
It meant we would not be close in this lifetime, but rather connected through lifetimes. It meant that our origin left the land, but now lives in and through us. It meant that our story was rerouted and thus we were divinely called to the work of rerooting.
Much love,
Hima xx
Life Without Us Pod
I met Valery Navarrete years ago when we first started Reset and since then she had become a collaborator, friend and teacher on community and communal living amongst other things.
After reading my journal on The Friendship Renaissance, she invited me on her podcast to chat and go deeper. We could have talked all day! In our convo we touched on friendship in the age of COVID-19, healthy friendship conflict, friend breakups, the difference between community and friendship, how to friend with a neurodivergent person, friendship infrastructure and much more.
Listen to our conversation here and thank you for having me. I loved our time together.
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