WHEN NO ROAD LEADS HOME

Writer Aatish Taseer on exile, identity and India

- BY SHUBHANGI SHAH

When I sit down to chat with author-journalist Aatish Taseer about his new book, A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile, I tell him that when I first picked it up, I expected to find little relatability to it. The son of an Indian journalist and a Pakistani politician who was assassinated in 2011 for defending a Christian woman accused of blasphemy, Taseer had his Overseas Citizenship of India (OCI) card revoked in 2019. While he maintains that it was because of a story he wrote for TIME magazine in 2019 with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the cover, titled ‘India’s Divider in Chief,’ the government argues it was because he concealed the Pakistani origins of his father.

“To lose one’s country is to know an intimate shame, like being disowned by a parent, turned out of one’s home,” Taseer writes at the start of A Return to Self. “Your country is so bound up with your sense of self that you do not realise what a ballast it has been until it is gone. It is one of the few things we are allowed to take for granted, and it is the basis of our curiosity about other places.”

This might stoke little relatability, at first, in somebody like me, privileged in every social context in India apart from perhaps gender, but as you delve deeper, layers to one’s identity unfold: sometimes in tandem, and sometimes in contrast, to one another.

A Return to Self is a travelogue about Taseer’s journey through six years of exile spanning 40,000 miles, across Turkey, Morocco, Mexico, Bolivia, Mongolia, Uzbekistan, Sri Lanka, Spain and Iraq, where he delves into the idea of identity through examples such as the Muslim Spain, and the socialist Uzbekistan, among others.

Is Taseer projecting himself as a world citizen?