A Tale of Haggis and Chole Bature: Seeing my birthplace for the first time
17th January, 1998: Just as the sun rose over a frigid January morning in the Scottish highlands, a little human, one of 255 born in that one minute, made her way into the world in a ward on the second floor of the Princess Royal Maternity Hospital. From the room that overlooked the M8 leading to Edinburgh, a small family of three, and now four, rejoiced the coming of their newest member. But thousands of miles away from home, they had only one another to celebrate with.
Together, they watched as this little human took her first steps and mumbled her first syllables ‘Bu-bu-BUBBY’. This was the name she had concocted for her brother, the eight year older guardian angel who endured her constant hair pulling and diaper wetting without a frown. At the age of eight months, she left the Land of the Unicorns for the Land of the Golden Bird. Little did she know that she won’t be back for very long.
I grew up in India and consider it my homeland; my entire family is Indian, I bear an Indian passport, accent, mindset and value system. However, throughout my years growing up in North India, I had been acutely aware of being at least a little ‘foreign.’ Games played by genes ensured my looks remained caught dead between my birthplace and my motherland. Remarks along the lines of ‘You don’t look Indian’ were met by a sheepish smile ‘Oh, I just wasn’t born here, otherwise I am completely Indian.’
Going through this drill every time made me think of how little I knew the place I used as an excuse. I remembered nothing about Glasgow beyond what little the two dimensional Kodachrome photographs showed me.
For eighteen years my family was caught up in the daily rigmarole of being busy without work, characteristic of urban nuclear units. I never found an excuse or mustered up the motivation to make the ten hour journey to visit Glasgow.
Glasgow became a vestigial part of my past, only to be remembered during first conversations with strangers and while filling ‘Place of birth’ blanks on bureaucratic forms.
Like the pet dog I had always wanted but never got, my requests for trips to the birth land were met by casual excuses by my parents “We’ll go for CWG 2014” “We’ll go before you graduate” or the most convenient indefinite postponement, “We’ll go when the time is right.” While growing up, I travelled across exotic lands and was exposed to every culture except the one I was born in.
And so, in the weeks before this trip materialized, I wasn’t filled with the anticipation you feel upon returning to a land you once knew. But rather, the angst you encounter when going to a strange and you should’ve known.
Scheduling conflicts of my modern nuclear family ensured that only my dad and I embarked on this journey to the land four of us had departed from.
We decided to take a bus from London to Glasgow, seeking to bask in the rusticness of the Scottish countryside. As I waited for our Megabus at the Victoria Coach station after having spent the day lugging my baggage across Westminster, I was filled nervous energy, albeit toned down because of the day’s physical exhaustion. Wanderlust took over as I glanced at the screens displaying buses to Vienna, Frankfurt, Lyon and Paris, and for a moment I may have switched spots to go somewhere other than a cold city in the middle of (relatively) nowhere. But get on the bus to Glasgow I did and was met with 13 hours of bone chilling air conditioning and spurts of shallow sleep interspersed by the chattering of the ever affable Scots behind me. The glare of early morning sunrays woke me up at 4:30am. My mind, conditioned for tropical 7am sunrises, was fazed. As we traversed expressways between large meadows and grazing grounds, a thin mist settled over the entire country side, fitting my mind’s image of the Scottish highlands.
We passed Edinburgh on our way and I got my first idea of what my birthplace may have looked like; roads lined by quaint suburban row houses, each with its unique window display: flower vases, vines and curtains of all shades, giving way to taller glass and steel shops and office buildings near the city centre, never quite losing their Victorian charm, and always guarded by the Edinburgh Castle, omnipresent in the horizon from its esteemed spot on the hill.
In Glasgow we were dropped off at the Buchanan Coach station, a short walk away from our old home on Rose Street.
While I was taking in the sights anew, with nothing but a stack of 18 year old photos I had carried with me to chronicle the prodigal daughter’s return home, the recollection in my dad’s eyes was apparent.
Our first stop was our old apartment. Laden with our backpacks, we trudged up the small hill just off Sauchiehall Street. As the house came into view, my dad pointed out the exact flat; the second window from the right on the third floor. The current residents had fit our pane with pink curtains, which remained drawn while we stood on the curb, admiring the home that had once been ours. I pulled out my photos and started clicking furiously. My mind probably afraid that this moment I had waited for for 18 years will pass all too soon and needed permanent accounts of it. However, I wasn’t filled with the same ecstasy as I had anticipated upon seeing the home I spent the first eight months of my life. My father went up to the park opposite our house that “hadn’t changed one bit”, climbing up the stone steps and gazing lovingly at the swings he had brought my brother to play on innumerable times.
Satisfied, we trudged back to Sauchiehall street. Over 18 years, it had changed a lot from the shopping street my dad had known. I noticed the excitement in his eyes every time he saw a store he recognized, and also the disappointment when he noticed the ones that had shut down or changed. I remarked saying change was inevitable over such a long time “4 feet 10 inches of me didn’t exist 18 years ago.” He was overcome by keta, me by anemoia.
We went up to the riverside, which had been redeveloped over the last 10 years. Glitzy steel and glass buildings now dominate the banks of the river Clyde, a far departure from the shipping docks that from Glasgow’s days as a trading port. Here, my dad and I were both complete foreigners, with no tie to the new developments where had previously only been rundown shipping yards.
At the end of the day, as we waited for a bus in Buchanan station, I realized that something I had imagined and fantasized about a million times over had finally happened.
Immediately, it didn’t seem quite as cathartic as I had expected. But as I organized my thoughts, i understood that Glasgow seemed slightly more in focus now. I could associate real places, brick and mortar structures, with the scenes I had seen in those photographs I flipped through on lazy Sunday mornings in Delhi. My brother’s school, my mother’s hospital, my dad’s place of work were now embedded in my memory by the grace of kinesthesia. I learnt that vestiges of our past never leave us, however perfunctory they may begin to seem. I still glance twice whenever I see the Scottish cross or hear that accent I can’t claim to fully understand.
Funnily enough, Scotland could’ve been Japan had my father decided to accept a different fellowship position than the one he actually did. I can only imagine my rendezvous ‘back’ to Tokyo in that case.
Fate works in indecipherable ways, taking us back to homes we forgot we had just as we’re about to leave the only ones we’ve ever known.
Our births are the greatest events of complete fortune that have profound impact on our life trajectories. Fate gave me Scotland, and I can’t be grateful enough.
