ChaiStan is a place where stories of migration and its meaning are deciphered. Chai because it carries with it a deep meaning of who I am as a Pakistani, with roots in a colonial history and a desire to find my own identity within its versatility, sometimes with an aroma of cardamom and cinnamon and sometimes just plain tea bags intentionally boiled in water for a prolonged period of time. Stan because it is literally translated as place. A place, that I keep wanting to find where the immigration experience that is my own is embraced in its full complexity and layers of contradictions.

You see, I came to the United States when I was six. Too young to really have a sense of what it means to leave your home and no control of what your parents believe to be the best actions to take for the family.

In preparation for the move my aunt told stories of what this new world would look like. My aunt is someone my two sisters and I, at the time, looked at as our grandmother and we called her phuppo. Not sure why we used that word, because the word really means aunt, on your father’s side. It wasn’t really questioned, it kind of just existed as is.

She talked of streets painted in gold, multitude of opportunities and a place where we can have more freedom.  It all sounded so exciting to a young mind so intrigued by stories of places for an away.

A lot later in life I understood the opportunities and freedom to mean a recognition that the Catholic community, the Christian community, would never really have an opportunity to be fully accepted in a country we called home.

This is my understanding of my family’s actions at that point in time. When you come from an immigrant family, the conversations of back home always focused on what you left behind. With my family, there were bittersweet ideas of what we had and what we didn’t have, but these ideas and memories were told in piecemeal. There was always a hiding of the entirety of facts that led up to behaviors and decisions. As a child, I would never have access to all of the information that would help me understand what was really going on. It was always if the feeling was present of the adults in the house willing to share, you as a child sit and take it in as something magical that you now have access to, like the opening of a secret door to a past. You had to walk carefully through this door, because if there are too many questions of why, how and what, then you were in a danger zone of being told to stop, “you shouldn’t ask so much from your elders”. But when this time did come, when you were told to stop you carried away the little pieces of information in a pocket sitting within your mind and slowly sew the pieces together until you have a more cohesive pattern forming.  This was what I did as I was growing up trying to understand the true meaning of this move.

These patterns that I began forming, in the pocket of my mind, began to overflow more and more as I got older. There was a desire for me to find new places for them. They began to form words and writing as I began to blend the world, I came from to the world that I was now living in. They took shape as stories finding the meaning of migration. These are stories of a child, now an adult, ruminating on the migration experience and the ripple effects of this experience as I live in new country, still calling the old country, home. The ongoing development of an identity that essentially sits in two worlds.