Illustration by Megan Eloise/The Gazelle

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“So, where are you from?”

Spare change and bathroom slippers. That atramental night portended resolution, revolution, as she was stirred from slumber and whisked away a hundred and eighty kilometres from Chiniot, Pakistan to

Amritsar, India. When 14th August became 15th, a cultural cleft engendered, when neighbours were family no more. Generations segued between nations.

I am a definite integral bounded between the unmistakable petrichor of the banks of Ravi and the razzmatazz of downtown Mumbai. I revel in the chaotic aesthetic of concrete and customs, where festivals are not functions of theism and nine to five jobs waltz with local train schedules.

I live on the confluence of Punjabi, Hindi, Urdu and English, where sentences, pauses and subordinate clauses transcend into inside jokes that bind five fountainheads of lived experiences under the same roof.

My veins course with the torrents of the Arabian Sea. I am a seam that threads worlds between a Gulf, from the Indo-Gangetic plains to the Wadis of the Emirates. An etch on a blueprint ages old, that started before my Dadima was stirred from slumber and whisked away a hundred and eighty kilometres and before her Dadima practiced Unani medicine that preceded scrubs and medical degrees.

So when you ask me where I’m from, I am rendered humbled by the luxuriance of my legacy.

I am from here. I am from there.

I am.

“So, where are you from?” “Uh. A2C-308-A.”