Peculiar Passports: Musings on a Migratory Life

Photo by Kit (formerly ConvertKit) on Unsplash (via the Unsplash License)

“Where are you? Have you not checked the news today?” 

My father’s voice crackles through telephone static as I wake up on what I thought would be a restful Saturday at the end of reading week. I feel confused as I register the time—he should’ve been on his flight already, a few hours into his journey back home to Dubai. 

“Mama’s alone. My flight from Amsterdam has been canceled. The airspace is closed.” 

These words are enough to jolt my nervous system back to 2020’s COVID-induced freeze state. Like with the global pandemic, this rapid, urgent, violent development in geopolitics is crucially, heartbreakingly, out of my control. What had seemed like a series of berating headlines over the past few days has suddenly (quite literally) hit too close for comfort. 

I hang up and ring my mother immediately. She tells me calmly that there is not much to do, but that she wishes her husband would be back already. At 2am the same night, I receive a message from her saying that “these blasts are scary.” I do not know how to respond to her. 

It is her fiftieth birthday tomorrow. None of us will be there to celebrate. 

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From a young age, I was taught that my passport was synonymous with my identity in the world. Alongside my name, handy phone numbers, and home addresses, I had branded this fact into my brain. Even in my sleep, I could recite my passport number and its expiry date in a heartbeat. I’ve even mastered the right amount of smiling required at immigration counters when the officers ask for the purpose of my visit. 

In fact, borders, passports, visa hierarchies and the endless Kafkaesque nature of migratory surveillance have become somewhat of a personal fascination. I’ve published several poems and essays on the subject and continually find myself drawn to these liminal spaces for writerly inspiration. As I wrote in a previous article for the Strand, for some of us, these in-between places have begun to feel like home. My entire life is defined by procedural foreignness.    

When I travel, I look at myself in airport bathroom mirrors and confirm that I have my passport three times. This is the diasporic version of chanting “Bloody Mary” but a lot less thrilling. When my boyfriend (who shares my skin tone, but has a “superior” passport) joins me on a trip, I feel myself morphing into my mother. The words “check if you have your passport” escape my lips before I can contain them. The ritual of checking thrice continues. 

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In undergrad, we learnt about the “super generational” migration of monarch butterflies. They are a remarkably intelligent group that follow a seasonal pattern of migration, traveling south and back across North America in search of warmer climates. No single butterfly makes the round trip. Each subset within the specific migrating population completes one leg of the journey—and effectively, each time, a new group returns to the homebase. 

They do not have to scan their wing-prints at checkpoints or provide evidence of their income for sustenance in their new, temporary homes. They travel over mountains, valleys, rivers, seas, forests, and beaches. They come back each time to rinse and repeat the process. 

Hand-drawn borders are not naturally occurring. Migration, however, is. 

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In King’s as a masters student, I am forced to label myself as a “postcolonial studies” scholar. What is “post”-colonial about systematic oppression through biotechnology and random checks at the airport because I am Brown is something I’ll never understand. The irony, moreover, of all but begging the Global North’s countries to let me in for a two week holiday after they ravaged over half the world for centuries never fails me. 

I know I'm privileged. Not everyone who makes it out of their home country does so because of dispossession. But I left Vancouver because I didn’t get my permanent residency, I left Dubai for “better” prospects, my parents left India for opportunity. Now, it seems like at some point, I’ll have to leave London too… either because unemployment seems like a real possibility or because Nigel Farage will want me out of here. I think of the monarch butterfly and its cyclical, multi-generational migratory patterns and how my own sustenance is iterated repeatedly through movement. 

Where I'm actually from—by which I mean the box I tick off when forms ask for my “ethnicity” and/or passport issuing country—has become a breeding ground for saffron-coloured nationalism. Returning there is not a matter of choice, but one defined by a lack thereof. I could not, in being true to myself, move to a country I have never known intimately as my own. India is a homeland I have yearned for without experiencing it, and to live there is to submit to a rising ethno-state with limited freedoms for those who dissent. 

So I ride the wave out and hope I can cram in a few more years wherever my postal code is currently situated before the “thank you, but please leave now” signal comes from the powers that be. 

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When I’m not internally screaming with frustration at the VFS Global offices once a year, I’m reading the news or scrolling through Tiktok. These days, the rise of fascism is palpable everywhere and social media provides no relief. 

A post by a white woman asking immigrants to “go back to where they came from” is followed by an infographic outlining the latest killings in Gaza. A further scroll reveals a ten-step must-have skincare routine from a tone-deaf influencer I couldn’t give a single shit about. By the time a Reform UK ad pops up in my algorithm, I’ve given up and closed the app. 

When my parents call later, they’ll remind me to check when graduation is so I can apply for the post graduate working visa. “Because we care about you,” they say. “Because we’re worried this will all have been for nothing” is what they really mean. 

I negotiate the weight of my passport with its significance. I look and sound Indian, but that doesn’t really open many doors (metaphorical and real) for me. I’ve lived in over five countries on three continents and speak three languages passably but hey, this document is ranked 80th in the world by the Henley Passport Index. Mama’s words, “khud koh kho dena, par iss ka dhyaan rakhna” echo in my ears on repeat. “Lose yourself, but take care of this thing.” 

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In real time, it’s Sunday night as I type this essay and I’ve spent the past 48 hours anxiously hustling between calling my parents every 30 minutes and checking the news. The airspace closure and uncertainty of the near future hangs over my family’s head like a cumulonimbus ready to rupture. 

Life in the diaspora has taught me to balance relationships across multiple timezones, long haul flights across several seas, and love across innumerable phone calls. It’s the nihilistic dread of geopolitics that I struggle with. In case you had any doubts, post-colonial or otherwise, imperialism and colonial extraction are alive and well today, too. And they’re built into the laws of who gets to freely move and where.

I’ve had some trouble formulating words for what all of this feels like. When my friends check in, it’s easy to provide literal updates. The storm inside continues to brew silently. 

But perhaps this confusion is just what it is. Maybe this concoction of frustration, rage, sadness, loss, hope, and yearning is exactly what living in the diaspora has always meant. It’s the weirdness of providing a concise response when someone asks you “where are you from?” and the humiliation of paying way too much money for a biometrics exam. 

I soothe myself with the knowledge that the monarch butterfly, at least, does not have to surrender to border control. 

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Edited by Hania Ahmed, Creative Editor