Portfolios > Portfolio 1

They called the sea kal pani, black water. To cross it was a rupture, a separation from the land, from culture, from caste, to be forever outside, forever a nomad. This was the journey of my ancestors, as slaves and indentured laborers, from India and China and Africa. Even as farmers, intimately connected to the land, their descendants’ feet would wander. This wandering became another rupture: my mother and her siblings’ migration to the United States. What are we, the generation that exists in the wake of estrangement, to make of the pieces? Acres of rice farm in a country we rarely visit, a creek, and in between: a farmhouse my grandfather built by hand.