The Immigrant’s Reassessment
By Saher Shaikh

When you visit home, you find there are labels peeking out of your Canadian bought shirt. On arrival as an immigrant, you receive scrutiny from friends and relatives which you not only accept, but rather, welcome. You face the cultural candid comments on whether you have gained weight or lost hair since your last visit. You shrug them off like the 40 degrees Pakistani summer heat that is uncomfortably comforting, in the “what is, is” attitude to life’s shortcomings.

The assessment is two-way. You look closely at your old home and count the cracks in the wall and the dust layers on shelves. Your heart needs confirmation that time went by here as well, without you. Strangely, you feel time has moved with you to your new country of residence. Home has been frozen and fossilised so it remains identical to a memory of many years ago. The visit is a surprise. The net in the door has small holes that mosquitoes can now make their way through. You no longer hear the neighbours’ rowdy late-night parties. Was this mall here the last time you came? To feel your way through the same place in different years is to see time framed into still pictures.

You enter your regular grocery store with the same happiness you feel when you step through the door of your home. This corner store was your one-stop shop for essentials. A home is a womb; the mother to whom you were born. For an immigrant, the circumference of home expands exponentially and unintentionally. It includes people and places that creep into nostalgic references.

You smile at the shopkeeper. He gives you a look of confusion. You have for a moment switched into duality, a visitor and citizen in your own homeland. Ladies do not really smile at shopkeepers. There are subtle lines of formality that exist where class and gender meet. In your mind, he is a part of what is familiar. The known code does not need deciphering. You can close your eyes and see the placement of brands and items in their exact spots in the aisles where you left them. The same red baskets stacked one onto another are confirming your picturesque memory. Your postcard memory is exact but not quite. The small bag of groceries cost double the amount from the last time you were here.

For an immigrant, a visit back home is to draw a continuous line back to the roots. Affirmation of belonging restarts from where you left off. It is like an old kameez that you had left behind on your last visit. Your mother has carefully washed and ironed it for you to wear again when you arrive home from the airport.