I became a father last year, just as I started a new job teaching English literature at a university in Toronto. Things I had only experienced as abstractions acquired a frightening solidity in that hospital room—birth, death and sickness; probabilities and inevitabilities; duty and responsibility. About four hours before my son was born, the machines started to beep insistently and the room was suddenly full of people in scrubs, no longer smiling. By nightfall, I was holding a baby, as my wife drifted out of consciousness, fighting a sudden fever. They brought in two mops to clean up the blood.
I have been thinking about death all the time since, suddenly aware of the precarious, animal flow of life between ancestors and descendants. I look at my parents closely when they pose for a photograph with my son, willing myself to see two diverging lines on a graph. My father’s visits to North America will remain intermittent; he becomes tongue-tied in front of white people, back-calculating the price of everything in rupees. My mother is more amenable to change, but only in the external environment. Absurdly, she insists on the baptism rituals of northwest India for the baby. We pray before a carafe of tap water that stands in for the waters of an underground stepwell; I print out a portrait of Shītalā Dēvī, the fickle goddess who carries the broom of pestilence in one hand and the cooling water of life in another. Above all, she wants us to pray to the memory of the family patriarch, my father’s father, who passed away recently. These are old rituals, older than gods, older than writing, inherited from peasants huddled before a black stone, keeping a great malevolent darkness at bay. My mother may have flown to Toronto in a jet, but vapid contradictions don’t bother her; she knows the pitralōka—the land of the ancestors—is real, and that my grandfather is watching over the new life descended from him.
For many Hindus, there are no obligations more fundamental than those owed to paternal ancestors, thought to dwell on the other side of the moon. Like crows, with whom they are often associated, the spirits of the dead are said to watch over the living. On new moon nights and during a particular month of the lunar calendar, typically coinciding with the autumnal equinox, these hungry spirits must be fed balls of rice and flour, weaving fathers and sons into a reciprocal web that stretches back to the primordial first human being.
I was raised to respect these rituals, and there must have been a time when I really did believe we were offering nourishment to the dead by feeding rotis to cows and crows at the appropriate times of the year. But this long intergenerational chain will break with me. I cannot imagine passing on this heavy an obligation; the idea of venerating a cow in downtown Toronto is too absurd to take seriously. The irony here is as obvious as a rusty blade, and I’m trying to handle this as carefully as I can. Here we are, the South Asian migrants who broke Canada’s consensus on immigration, so afraid of forgetting our ancestors, of losing our place in the chain of being.
●
“The great replacement,” an unsavory but undeniably potent conspiracy theory that haunts the political unconscious of the liberal West, tells a different story. The phrase itself gained notoriety after appearing in the manifesto of the mass shooter who gunned down 51 Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, but originated in the writings of Renaud Camus, French socialist turned right-wing provocateur. In his manifesto, You Will Not Replace Us!, published in English in 2018, Camus argues that the unprecedented rates of immigration to Europe and North America over the last few decades have created a “genocide by substitution,” transforming what used to be nations into mere economic zones, communities into interchangeable masses. Underlying his hostility is a more radical critique of what he calls “replacism,” the “central gesture of contemporary societies”:
Stone masonry is being replaced by ferroconcrete, concrete by plaster … countryside by the universal suburb … paths by hiking trails … residents by tourists, natives by non-natives, Europeans by Africans, White Anglo-Saxons by Afro-Americans and Latinos, mothers by surrogate mothers, men by women, women by inflatable dolls, men and women by robots, robots by robot-like humans, peoples by other peoples and communities, humanity by post-humanity, humanism by transhumanism, man by Undifferentiated Human Matter (UHM).
The elites who advocate for immigration as a solution for labor shortages under globalization, Camus suggests, essentially see human beings as a “Nutella” spread—homogeneous sludge, post-industrial and post-national, shaped purely by market forces, severed from any meaningful past, infinitely replaceable. But this is hubris: “a submerging wave of ethnic substitution” will, Camus asserts, hollow out the shared culture of the host country, leading to a perpetual malaise described with increasingly incendiary rhetoric: “invasion,” “colonisation,” “occupation.” Camus is skeptical of migrants’ ability to assimilate, even if they wanted to, even generations after their arrival; eventually, there will be nothing left for them to assimilate into.
It is unsettling to imagine my son growing up in the counterfeit yet fiercely identitarian world Camus imagines. Perhaps, like him, it is not assimilation I fear, but something worse. I perform my family’s rituals like an actor, as if I am only pretending to be a father and a grandson—secretly convinced that when the deception is discovered, the pitralōka will fade into shadow, and my son will inherit nothing. The sacred world my mother still inhabits is not mine—I too am afraid of becoming a Nutella man.
“To be rooted,” Simone Weil tells us, “is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.” It is only to avoid the loss of the past that people put up such a “desperate resistance to being conquered.” Some of the most memorable writing of the twentieth century emerged out of exile or emigration, experiences that heightened the drama of literature’s struggle against the great uprooting that would eventually come for us all. A desperate hunger for roots lends a restless brilliance to the Pakistani writer Intizar Husain’s fictions of post-Partition life—there is no caravan that can take Husain’s protagonists back to the villages where they were born, they wander through the streets of adopted cities searching for familiar trees, forever barred from a return to the enchanted past of myth and memory. Displacement becomes a universal and collective experience; we burn though Kafka, Ghalib and Proust to arrive at a new kind of modernist novel; and yet, all is not forgotten or lost. Husain’s reader wanders through a dark forest and comes face to face with the living Buddha, who speaks to the reader in the present tense about a bird nesting in a burning sandalwood tree. But the elderly men and women who haunt Toronto’s drab suburban malls in winter afternoons present a different vision of the migrant as a universal and futuristic figure: lonely, stranded, sterile, all of human history contained in the eyes of a grandmother who has lost her ability to speak English after a stroke.
The great Hindi modernist Nirmal Verma once observed that the purpose of modern literature is to save us from this cul-de-sac of ātma vismriti, or self-forgetting. When we lose faith in rituals, we turn to literature to hold onto a primordial sense of existence as a tremendous and fascinating mystery. But the modernist dream of a world literature as a dialogue between civilizations is a dying project now, buried under a mountain of feel-good multicultural kitsch. Even typing out that notorious nineteenth-century word—civilization—feels like role-playing, like putting on a hat and pretending to be Spengler or Tagore; we who dwell in the world Zuckerberg built have no ancestors.
The ancient Greeks wrote of a blessed land called Hyperborea, beyond the reach of the harsh northern winds, a land of peace and sunshine exempt from all decay. In our times, Hyperborea has become a far-right meme, a seductive vision of a lost ancestral homeland shaped out of scraps of popular culture: The Lord of the Rings, television ads from the 1960s, bucolic photographs of Europe before mass migration. But it is all a waking dream, a willful act of self-deception and scapegoating, not a way out of Spenglerian decline as much as a symptom of it. None of us—Camus, the peddlers of multicultural ephemera, the internet Nazis or me—is immune to the self-forgetting that follows the transformation of genuine cultural memory into kitsch. What comes after ātma vismriti?
●
The only pitr I can picture is my Dadu, my father’s father, the one clear face in a procession of alien shadows. Dadu was a tall man with a loud, booming voice, much taller than my father, who craved—but rarely received—his approval. Like a canny investor timing the market, he hoarded much of his affection, skipping a generation. Unlike every other family we knew, Dadu did not live with us in Kolkata in a big, multigenerational setup but stayed far away in Ahmedabad, a journey of two days by train. He would visit us every year, usually in early winter, staying through Diwali and my birthday, the most vivid time of the year.
My grandfather hated small talk, hated talking on the phone and hated wasting money. His annual visits were never longer than two months. By that point, he would become crabby and withdrawn, counting the extra kilos he had put on, getting on my mother’s nerves by criticizing how she ran the household, complaining about the poor quality of the vegetables, the rice, the air. In the meantime, we shared a room, and went to a play or a concert every Saturday, listening to all the greats from India and Pakistan. At night he removed his dentures, rubbed coconut oil on his heels, and wore a woolen cap whose ends were tied under his chin, to protect his bald head from the cold. In the morning he put on running shoes and socks that went up to his knees, and went on a long walk. Before I began studying Hindi at school, it was my grandfather who first taught me my letters, writing out the solid squiggles of the Devanagari alphabet for me to copy.
Dadu must have been about ten when India was decolonized and partitioned in 1947, and he remembered stockpiling bricks on the roof of his home in small-town Rajasthan, preparing for an attack that never came. His own father, my great-grandfather, had been an ill-tempered and dominating shopkeeper; his mother, my great-grandmother, had gone blind when he was still a teenager—it may have been something as trivial as glaucoma. But everyone was fatalistic about afflictions then, and besides, she was a woman. The town itself was half-village at this point, surrounded by barren hills of sand and occasionally visited by strange nomadic tribes, distant cousins of the Roma peoples of Europe. When my grandfather joined a textile firm as a trainee manager, the whole industry was run by westernized Parsis who detested the new breed of grubby Indian businessmen. He played badminton with the outgoing Parsis and fathered three children while still in his twenties. He retired as a vice president who had represented his firm on business trips to France, where he had great difficulty finding the Champs-Élysées, and Italy, where his passport and wallet were stolen by a child who bumped into him on the street. He would repeat stories from these travels the rest of his life, doing every accent gleefully. His journey from behind the counter of a village store to the Champs-Élysées was miraculous, but the twentieth century is full of these minor miracles. In every way that mattered, his was an ordinary Indian life of the twentieth century, if more prosperous and luckier than most, shielded by caste and by the good fortune of being born on the “right” side of the line that partitioned the country into two. It is only now, two years after his passing, that I am beginning to understand that my grandfather’s was a hinge generation, whose modern affectations were superimposed over a deep agrarian past.
Like many Indians, my grandfather was named after a god; his name literally meant the “Lord of the Universe.” But this particular lord was not an especially religious man. The music he listened to was a fairly typical selection of songs from the Hindi cinema and popular ghazals in Urdu. But he did like to play music with a religious flavor in the morning, the somber drone of tānpurā a counterpoint to the bustling street. The song I remember best was from a cassette celebrating the poems of Kabir, the fifteenth-century mystic from Banaras whose haunting poems have provided a shared spiritual idiom across north India for half a millennium:
Ud jayēgā hans akēlā The goose will fly away alone
Jag darshan kā mēlā The world a carnival of images
Jaisē pāt girē taruvar kē Like a leaf falling from a tree
Milnā bahūt duhēlā How will you find it again
Nā jānū kidhar girēgā No one knows where it will land
Lageyā pawan kā rēlā It has been struck by the wind
Kumar Gandharva sang these verses as the great masters of the classical tradition usually did, indifferently enunciating the words, which floated away from you like leaves in the wind:
Jam kē dūt badē majbūta Yama’s messengers are very strong
Jam sē padā jhamēlā You’ve picked a fight with the God of Death
Some translate hansa as swan rather than goose, but you only have to take in a single glimpse of the magnificent bar-headed goose—which spends summers in Russia and winters in India, flying over the Himalayas at impossible heights—to feel the power of this well-worn symbol. There is beauty and wisdom but little consolation in this austere music (“No other poet in India—perhaps no other poet in the world—has spoken about ‘Kāl’, Death, as Kabir has done, with such tragic intensity,” notes a French Indologist). I can still picture the cassette, the cassette player and the off-white laminated side table: I was transfixed as a child, I remain transfixed now, I sing Kabir’s song as a lullaby for my child, I hum it in subway cars and while waiting for my order at McDonald’s.
●
What do we really inherit from our ancestors? What are we all so afraid of losing? A posture toward the world, anchored in the seasons and smells of a homeland? A language? A way of bearing up under history? I was in college when my grandfather began making excuses and skipping his morning walks, like a child avoiding homework. This would have been around 2010, about ten years into an increasingly sour retirement. He would watch the news for hours, the same headlines over and over: the U.S.-India nuclear deal of 2005, the Mumbai terrorist attacks of 2008, the rise of Modi. He signed up for a computer class but never got the hang of email; he bought a smartphone to use WhatsApp, but the only messages he managed to send were strings of gibberish. I helped him clean up his phone book, and he made me delete the details of everyone on his list who had passed away. Half the list, deleted in half an hour. Everything fell away toward the end, like King Lear in the heath, unbuttoning his clothes. Off, off, you lendings! Eventually, he stopped repeating his stories from France and Italy. Delete, delete, delete.
I was abroad when he died. I could not return for the funeral. It was the middle of the semester, and if I left the United States, where I lived then, I would need a new visa stamp before I could return, and there were no appointments to be had. The last time I spoke to him, on a video call, he didn’t recognize me, confused by his grandson’s receding hairline. I could not bear to see the indignity of his thin, wasting legs, to hear him crying out in pain like an animal. Later, my grandmother said to me that he had known death was coming. He could see four invisible men who had come to take him away, and deliriously, he kept asking them to wait. He should have known; Yama’s messengers are strong beyond measure.
Most Hindus cremate rather than bury their dead. The right prayers must be said, the skull must be cracked, the right rituals must be performed, usually by a son or another male descendant, before the body can be burnt. A year later, the survivors must feed the spirits of the departed; only then will the prēt—the departed soul, the ghost, the phantom—find a place in the pitralōka and watch over the next three generations. “If the mortuary rites are neglected or inadequately performed,” the anthropologist Jonathan Parry observes, in a poignant study of death rites in the Hindu holy city of Banaras, “the cycle is disrupted and the result is barrenness, miscarriages, and the death of infants and a decline in the family fortunes.” When I returned to India, my grandfather had already been cremated, his ashes dispersed in the Ganga by a cousin. There is a gross, corporeal finality to the process of cremation that is emblematic of Hindu ritual practices—the individual gives way to a primal human, there are no eulogies; the goose flies away, alone. There is no gravestone I can visit, there are no grisly remainders to dig up and pose Hamletian questions to. Where be your music now, Dadu? Where be your endless walks? If you google my grandfather’s name now, nothing turns up. By the time my Canadian son grows up, it will be as if Dadu had never existed.
And this is why I empathize with the sense of real grief that animates the likes of Camus, even if I think their faith in an organic national community as a custodian for cultural memory is misplaced: there is no escaping the pull of amnesia in modernity. Delete, delete, delete.
●
Late one night in Toronto, where I live now, I caught the eye of the only white person in a subway car packed with retail and hospitality workers returning to distant suburbs, and felt her bewilderment infect me like a virus. In Canada, it is Indians from India who are the face, the smell and the sound of the immigration problem—increasingly seen as interlopers who undercut wages, drive up rents and bring the intractable religious conflicts of their homeland with them. Billboards advertising banking services for “newcomers” still feature beaming Indian families, but it’s clear the Canadian model of immigration as a happy multicultural mosaic is fraying. Things went sour very quickly after the pandemic: waitlists for health care and public housing grew longer, property prices kept rising, real wages stagnated. In 2022, only 27 percent of Canadians felt that the country was letting in too many new migrants; by 2024, polls indicated that two out of three Canadians had had enough of current levels of immigration, undoing a consensus built over decades. It would be childish to pretend there is no real underlying issue here: a recent poll revealed that more than 80 percent of recent migrants themselves agreed with the sentiment that Canada was admitting too many immigrants and international students without adequate planning. You don’t need surveys to sense this mood of diminishing hospitality: it hangs in the air, showing up as an involuntary hardening in some people’s faces when they hear you speak Hindi, like tired hosts waiting for an unwelcome set of guests to finally leave. As many as five million temporary residents have visas expiring in 2025 or 2026; the expectation seems to be that they will just pack their bags and go.
The liberal imagination of Canada as a welfare state with boring end-of-history politics, an anti-America, is years out of date. It is the Walmart Supercenter near me that seems to better capture the national mood—overpriced and crowded with people from all over the world fighting over spots in the parking lot. For anti-immigration hard-liners, Canada is a cautionary tale: what happens when self-hating elites open a country’s borders to an endless supply of immigrants from the global South, or “infinity Indians,” as the meme goes. The anonymous corners of the internet are dispiriting. Doctored images of an Indian man defecating on a public beach compete for views with real videos of Indians littering, Indians being noisy, Indians fighting. The captions and comments warn of an unrecognizable future: “Is this Canada?” “Canada in 2050!” Economic grievances give way to a deeper ethnographic contempt—and the more insidious fear of cultural extinction.
Yet in polite society, people still prefer to blame government policy rather than the migrants themselves, and even in the midst of last year’s hard-fought electoral campaign, no major Canadian politician demonized newcomers using rhetoric as harsh as is commonplace in American politics. This is still a resilient and welcoming nation; as winter approaches, you have to keep your eyes on the trees: the red oak by the brutalist apartment tower, the sugar maple near the bridge where the addicts congregate, a line of stately white birches in a sad little street of run-down row homes. The prospect of a life without ancestors is too horrible to contemplate—I would rather my son join this tribe and adopt its ways than live in an ethnic cul-de-sac. Let Kabir and the Hindi alphabet fade away, let the rites of pitr veneration be forgotten. On Remembrance Day, let him wear a poppy to mourn the Canadians who died fighting for the Crown in the two world wars. There are no families or nations on the other side.
●
Before I became a father, I used to crave an opportunity to free myself of the dross of dead customs, quoting Marx like a mantra: “the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” No more. Now I crave the heaviness, the ballast, I used to despise. When the baby smiles toothlessly at me, an oversized beanie on his dome, looking uncannily like his great-grandfather, I feel like I’ve been granted a chance to set everything right, to repay a debt, to pass on an inheritance of strength, with interest compounded. What I need to do right now is make sure my son is wearing something warm as I place him in a baby carrier against my chest and head out for a walk. A long walk, as far as my legs can take us—at least this tradition I will pass on.
And in the classroom, where I teach literature, I coax a new generation of Canadians to put down roots somewhere, anywhere: Antigone, the Odyssey, Old English poetry, the U-shaped narratives of loss and redemption every English speaker has inherited from the Bible. There are days when it all feels superfluous and obsolete, when my students look blankly at me as I speak about medieval Indian poetry, resisting any kinship with the army of recent migrants who have flooded Toronto, traveling all the way around the world to deliver takeout and load boxes in warehouses.
Some days the words work as keys, just as they should—regardless of their origin, or my students’. “I have experienced this kind of love,” says a serious-looking young woman, as we read a two-thousand-year-old Tamil poem in translation, captivated by its central image of wild animals lapping a pool of dirty, brackish water in an absent lover’s backyard. Midway through the semester, we read a famous poem by Rabindranath Tagore, about a clerk in colonial Calcutta whose small life is circumscribed by squalor: “Mango skins and stones, jack-fruit pulp / Fish-gills, dead kittens / And God knows what other rubbish / Pile up and rot.” Somehow, precariously, the poem transcends its setting, saved by classical music, by a neighbor who plays runs in the Sindhu Bhairavi raga on his clarinet: “At once the alley is a lie, / False and vile as the ravings of a drunkard.” We sit with this artifact from another language and another city; I talk about the elderly Chinese busker who plays Schubert in downtown Toronto, someone else talks about the ugliness and trash they encounter on their daily commute. I wish there was more to say. But literature will have to do. It remains our most valuable common inheritance across national and cultural lines, the only meaningful form of cosmopolitanism we can readily access that is irreducible to undifferentiated slurry. Even as the old rituals disappear, increasingly replaced by kitsch and fantasy and slop, these hieroglyphs endure—a fragile but secular bulwark against self-forgetting. For the dead outnumber us all—we share this earth with more than a hundred billion phantoms, if you believe the Population Reference Bureau’s calculations. But only the living have the power to turn ghosts into ancestors.
Art credit: Rina Banerjee, Sap of earth n’ blood, leaky, which adaptation may deliver one baby, to clear ethnicity and transparent gender in centre and in likeness of parents, baby by wife, baby by husband from side to side, upon smiling country and unnatural culture appeals to no science or hidden DNA this n that may collect to throttle all these other extreme parts, swallow to swallow until full in silence hollow, 2017. Steel, wood, glass, silver leaf, cowrie shells, sea shells, taxidermy eyes, vintage saris. 368.3 × 254 × 254 cm. © Rina Banerjee. Courtesy of Ota Fine Arts (Singapore / Shanghai / Tokyo).
I became a father last year, just as I started a new job teaching English literature at a university in Toronto. Things I had only experienced as abstractions acquired a frightening solidity in that hospital room—birth, death and sickness; probabilities and inevitabilities; duty and responsibility. About four hours before my son was born, the machines started to beep insistently and the room was suddenly full of people in scrubs, no longer smiling. By nightfall, I was holding a baby, as my wife drifted out of consciousness, fighting a sudden fever. They brought in two mops to clean up the blood.
I have been thinking about death all the time since, suddenly aware of the precarious, animal flow of life between ancestors and descendants. I look at my parents closely when they pose for a photograph with my son, willing myself to see two diverging lines on a graph. My father’s visits to North America will remain intermittent; he becomes tongue-tied in front of white people, back-calculating the price of everything in rupees. My mother is more amenable to change, but only in the external environment. Absurdly, she insists on the baptism rituals of northwest India for the baby. We pray before a carafe of tap water that stands in for the waters of an underground stepwell; I print out a portrait of Shītalā Dēvī, the fickle goddess who carries the broom of pestilence in one hand and the cooling water of life in another. Above all, she wants us to pray to the memory of the family patriarch, my father’s father, who passed away recently. These are old rituals, older than gods, older than writing, inherited from peasants huddled before a black stone, keeping a great malevolent darkness at bay. My mother may have flown to Toronto in a jet, but vapid contradictions don’t bother her; she knows the pitralōka—the land of the ancestors—is real, and that my grandfather is watching over the new life descended from him.
For many Hindus, there are no obligations more fundamental than those owed to paternal ancestors, thought to dwell on the other side of the moon. Like crows, with whom they are often associated, the spirits of the dead are said to watch over the living. On new moon nights and during a particular month of the lunar calendar, typically coinciding with the autumnal equinox, these hungry spirits must be fed balls of rice and flour, weaving fathers and sons into a reciprocal web that stretches back to the primordial first human being.
I was raised to respect these rituals, and there must have been a time when I really did believe we were offering nourishment to the dead by feeding rotis to cows and crows at the appropriate times of the year. But this long intergenerational chain will break with me. I cannot imagine passing on this heavy an obligation; the idea of venerating a cow in downtown Toronto is too absurd to take seriously. The irony here is as obvious as a rusty blade, and I’m trying to handle this as carefully as I can. Here we are, the South Asian migrants who broke Canada’s consensus on immigration, so afraid of forgetting our ancestors, of losing our place in the chain of being.
●
“The great replacement,” an unsavory but undeniably potent conspiracy theory that haunts the political unconscious of the liberal West, tells a different story. The phrase itself gained notoriety after appearing in the manifesto of the mass shooter who gunned down 51 Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, but originated in the writings of Renaud Camus, French socialist turned right-wing provocateur. In his manifesto, You Will Not Replace Us!, published in English in 2018, Camus argues that the unprecedented rates of immigration to Europe and North America over the last few decades have created a “genocide by substitution,” transforming what used to be nations into mere economic zones, communities into interchangeable masses. Underlying his hostility is a more radical critique of what he calls “replacism,” the “central gesture of contemporary societies”:
The elites who advocate for immigration as a solution for labor shortages under globalization, Camus suggests, essentially see human beings as a “Nutella” spread—homogeneous sludge, post-industrial and post-national, shaped purely by market forces, severed from any meaningful past, infinitely replaceable. But this is hubris: “a submerging wave of ethnic substitution” will, Camus asserts, hollow out the shared culture of the host country, leading to a perpetual malaise described with increasingly incendiary rhetoric: “invasion,” “colonisation,” “occupation.” Camus is skeptical of migrants’ ability to assimilate, even if they wanted to, even generations after their arrival; eventually, there will be nothing left for them to assimilate into.
It is unsettling to imagine my son growing up in the counterfeit yet fiercely identitarian world Camus imagines. Perhaps, like him, it is not assimilation I fear, but something worse. I perform my family’s rituals like an actor, as if I am only pretending to be a father and a grandson—secretly convinced that when the deception is discovered, the pitralōka will fade into shadow, and my son will inherit nothing. The sacred world my mother still inhabits is not mine—I too am afraid of becoming a Nutella man.
“To be rooted,” Simone Weil tells us, “is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.” It is only to avoid the loss of the past that people put up such a “desperate resistance to being conquered.” Some of the most memorable writing of the twentieth century emerged out of exile or emigration, experiences that heightened the drama of literature’s struggle against the great uprooting that would eventually come for us all. A desperate hunger for roots lends a restless brilliance to the Pakistani writer Intizar Husain’s fictions of post-Partition life—there is no caravan that can take Husain’s protagonists back to the villages where they were born, they wander through the streets of adopted cities searching for familiar trees, forever barred from a return to the enchanted past of myth and memory. Displacement becomes a universal and collective experience; we burn though Kafka, Ghalib and Proust to arrive at a new kind of modernist novel; and yet, all is not forgotten or lost. Husain’s reader wanders through a dark forest and comes face to face with the living Buddha, who speaks to the reader in the present tense about a bird nesting in a burning sandalwood tree. But the elderly men and women who haunt Toronto’s drab suburban malls in winter afternoons present a different vision of the migrant as a universal and futuristic figure: lonely, stranded, sterile, all of human history contained in the eyes of a grandmother who has lost her ability to speak English after a stroke.
The great Hindi modernist Nirmal Verma once observed that the purpose of modern literature is to save us from this cul-de-sac of ātma vismriti, or self-forgetting. When we lose faith in rituals, we turn to literature to hold onto a primordial sense of existence as a tremendous and fascinating mystery. But the modernist dream of a world literature as a dialogue between civilizations is a dying project now, buried under a mountain of feel-good multicultural kitsch. Even typing out that notorious nineteenth-century word—civilization—feels like role-playing, like putting on a hat and pretending to be Spengler or Tagore; we who dwell in the world Zuckerberg built have no ancestors.
The ancient Greeks wrote of a blessed land called Hyperborea, beyond the reach of the harsh northern winds, a land of peace and sunshine exempt from all decay. In our times, Hyperborea has become a far-right meme, a seductive vision of a lost ancestral homeland shaped out of scraps of popular culture: The Lord of the Rings, television ads from the 1960s, bucolic photographs of Europe before mass migration. But it is all a waking dream, a willful act of self-deception and scapegoating, not a way out of Spenglerian decline as much as a symptom of it. None of us—Camus, the peddlers of multicultural ephemera, the internet Nazis or me—is immune to the self-forgetting that follows the transformation of genuine cultural memory into kitsch. What comes after ātma vismriti?
●
The only pitr I can picture is my Dadu, my father’s father, the one clear face in a procession of alien shadows. Dadu was a tall man with a loud, booming voice, much taller than my father, who craved—but rarely received—his approval. Like a canny investor timing the market, he hoarded much of his affection, skipping a generation. Unlike every other family we knew, Dadu did not live with us in Kolkata in a big, multigenerational setup but stayed far away in Ahmedabad, a journey of two days by train. He would visit us every year, usually in early winter, staying through Diwali and my birthday, the most vivid time of the year.
My grandfather hated small talk, hated talking on the phone and hated wasting money. His annual visits were never longer than two months. By that point, he would become crabby and withdrawn, counting the extra kilos he had put on, getting on my mother’s nerves by criticizing how she ran the household, complaining about the poor quality of the vegetables, the rice, the air. In the meantime, we shared a room, and went to a play or a concert every Saturday, listening to all the greats from India and Pakistan. At night he removed his dentures, rubbed coconut oil on his heels, and wore a woolen cap whose ends were tied under his chin, to protect his bald head from the cold. In the morning he put on running shoes and socks that went up to his knees, and went on a long walk. Before I began studying Hindi at school, it was my grandfather who first taught me my letters, writing out the solid squiggles of the Devanagari alphabet for me to copy.
Dadu must have been about ten when India was decolonized and partitioned in 1947, and he remembered stockpiling bricks on the roof of his home in small-town Rajasthan, preparing for an attack that never came. His own father, my great-grandfather, had been an ill-tempered and dominating shopkeeper; his mother, my great-grandmother, had gone blind when he was still a teenager—it may have been something as trivial as glaucoma. But everyone was fatalistic about afflictions then, and besides, she was a woman. The town itself was half-village at this point, surrounded by barren hills of sand and occasionally visited by strange nomadic tribes, distant cousins of the Roma peoples of Europe. When my grandfather joined a textile firm as a trainee manager, the whole industry was run by westernized Parsis who detested the new breed of grubby Indian businessmen. He played badminton with the outgoing Parsis and fathered three children while still in his twenties. He retired as a vice president who had represented his firm on business trips to France, where he had great difficulty finding the Champs-Élysées, and Italy, where his passport and wallet were stolen by a child who bumped into him on the street. He would repeat stories from these travels the rest of his life, doing every accent gleefully. His journey from behind the counter of a village store to the Champs-Élysées was miraculous, but the twentieth century is full of these minor miracles. In every way that mattered, his was an ordinary Indian life of the twentieth century, if more prosperous and luckier than most, shielded by caste and by the good fortune of being born on the “right” side of the line that partitioned the country into two. It is only now, two years after his passing, that I am beginning to understand that my grandfather’s was a hinge generation, whose modern affectations were superimposed over a deep agrarian past.
Like many Indians, my grandfather was named after a god; his name literally meant the “Lord of the Universe.” But this particular lord was not an especially religious man. The music he listened to was a fairly typical selection of songs from the Hindi cinema and popular ghazals in Urdu. But he did like to play music with a religious flavor in the morning, the somber drone of tānpurā a counterpoint to the bustling street. The song I remember best was from a cassette celebrating the poems of Kabir, the fifteenth-century mystic from Banaras whose haunting poems have provided a shared spiritual idiom across north India for half a millennium:
Kumar Gandharva sang these verses as the great masters of the classical tradition usually did, indifferently enunciating the words, which floated away from you like leaves in the wind:
Some translate hansa as swan rather than goose, but you only have to take in a single glimpse of the magnificent bar-headed goose—which spends summers in Russia and winters in India, flying over the Himalayas at impossible heights—to feel the power of this well-worn symbol. There is beauty and wisdom but little consolation in this austere music (“No other poet in India—perhaps no other poet in the world—has spoken about ‘Kāl’, Death, as Kabir has done, with such tragic intensity,” notes a French Indologist). I can still picture the cassette, the cassette player and the off-white laminated side table: I was transfixed as a child, I remain transfixed now, I sing Kabir’s song as a lullaby for my child, I hum it in subway cars and while waiting for my order at McDonald’s.
●
What do we really inherit from our ancestors? What are we all so afraid of losing? A posture toward the world, anchored in the seasons and smells of a homeland? A language? A way of bearing up under history? I was in college when my grandfather began making excuses and skipping his morning walks, like a child avoiding homework. This would have been around 2010, about ten years into an increasingly sour retirement. He would watch the news for hours, the same headlines over and over: the U.S.-India nuclear deal of 2005, the Mumbai terrorist attacks of 2008, the rise of Modi. He signed up for a computer class but never got the hang of email; he bought a smartphone to use WhatsApp, but the only messages he managed to send were strings of gibberish. I helped him clean up his phone book, and he made me delete the details of everyone on his list who had passed away. Half the list, deleted in half an hour. Everything fell away toward the end, like King Lear in the heath, unbuttoning his clothes. Off, off, you lendings! Eventually, he stopped repeating his stories from France and Italy. Delete, delete, delete.
I was abroad when he died. I could not return for the funeral. It was the middle of the semester, and if I left the United States, where I lived then, I would need a new visa stamp before I could return, and there were no appointments to be had. The last time I spoke to him, on a video call, he didn’t recognize me, confused by his grandson’s receding hairline. I could not bear to see the indignity of his thin, wasting legs, to hear him crying out in pain like an animal. Later, my grandmother said to me that he had known death was coming. He could see four invisible men who had come to take him away, and deliriously, he kept asking them to wait. He should have known; Yama’s messengers are strong beyond measure.
Most Hindus cremate rather than bury their dead. The right prayers must be said, the skull must be cracked, the right rituals must be performed, usually by a son or another male descendant, before the body can be burnt. A year later, the survivors must feed the spirits of the departed; only then will the prēt—the departed soul, the ghost, the phantom—find a place in the pitralōka and watch over the next three generations. “If the mortuary rites are neglected or inadequately performed,” the anthropologist Jonathan Parry observes, in a poignant study of death rites in the Hindu holy city of Banaras, “the cycle is disrupted and the result is barrenness, miscarriages, and the death of infants and a decline in the family fortunes.” When I returned to India, my grandfather had already been cremated, his ashes dispersed in the Ganga by a cousin. There is a gross, corporeal finality to the process of cremation that is emblematic of Hindu ritual practices—the individual gives way to a primal human, there are no eulogies; the goose flies away, alone. There is no gravestone I can visit, there are no grisly remainders to dig up and pose Hamletian questions to. Where be your music now, Dadu? Where be your endless walks? If you google my grandfather’s name now, nothing turns up. By the time my Canadian son grows up, it will be as if Dadu had never existed.
And this is why I empathize with the sense of real grief that animates the likes of Camus, even if I think their faith in an organic national community as a custodian for cultural memory is misplaced: there is no escaping the pull of amnesia in modernity. Delete, delete, delete.
●
Late one night in Toronto, where I live now, I caught the eye of the only white person in a subway car packed with retail and hospitality workers returning to distant suburbs, and felt her bewilderment infect me like a virus. In Canada, it is Indians from India who are the face, the smell and the sound of the immigration problem—increasingly seen as interlopers who undercut wages, drive up rents and bring the intractable religious conflicts of their homeland with them. Billboards advertising banking services for “newcomers” still feature beaming Indian families, but it’s clear the Canadian model of immigration as a happy multicultural mosaic is fraying. Things went sour very quickly after the pandemic: waitlists for health care and public housing grew longer, property prices kept rising, real wages stagnated. In 2022, only 27 percent of Canadians felt that the country was letting in too many new migrants; by 2024, polls indicated that two out of three Canadians had had enough of current levels of immigration, undoing a consensus built over decades. It would be childish to pretend there is no real underlying issue here: a recent poll revealed that more than 80 percent of recent migrants themselves agreed with the sentiment that Canada was admitting too many immigrants and international students without adequate planning. You don’t need surveys to sense this mood of diminishing hospitality: it hangs in the air, showing up as an involuntary hardening in some people’s faces when they hear you speak Hindi, like tired hosts waiting for an unwelcome set of guests to finally leave. As many as five million temporary residents have visas expiring in 2025 or 2026; the expectation seems to be that they will just pack their bags and go.
The liberal imagination of Canada as a welfare state with boring end-of-history politics, an anti-America, is years out of date. It is the Walmart Supercenter near me that seems to better capture the national mood—overpriced and crowded with people from all over the world fighting over spots in the parking lot. For anti-immigration hard-liners, Canada is a cautionary tale: what happens when self-hating elites open a country’s borders to an endless supply of immigrants from the global South, or “infinity Indians,” as the meme goes. The anonymous corners of the internet are dispiriting. Doctored images of an Indian man defecating on a public beach compete for views with real videos of Indians littering, Indians being noisy, Indians fighting. The captions and comments warn of an unrecognizable future: “Is this Canada?” “Canada in 2050!” Economic grievances give way to a deeper ethnographic contempt—and the more insidious fear of cultural extinction.
Yet in polite society, people still prefer to blame government policy rather than the migrants themselves, and even in the midst of last year’s hard-fought electoral campaign, no major Canadian politician demonized newcomers using rhetoric as harsh as is commonplace in American politics. This is still a resilient and welcoming nation; as winter approaches, you have to keep your eyes on the trees: the red oak by the brutalist apartment tower, the sugar maple near the bridge where the addicts congregate, a line of stately white birches in a sad little street of run-down row homes. The prospect of a life without ancestors is too horrible to contemplate—I would rather my son join this tribe and adopt its ways than live in an ethnic cul-de-sac. Let Kabir and the Hindi alphabet fade away, let the rites of pitr veneration be forgotten. On Remembrance Day, let him wear a poppy to mourn the Canadians who died fighting for the Crown in the two world wars. There are no families or nations on the other side.
●
Before I became a father, I used to crave an opportunity to free myself of the dross of dead customs, quoting Marx like a mantra: “the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” No more. Now I crave the heaviness, the ballast, I used to despise. When the baby smiles toothlessly at me, an oversized beanie on his dome, looking uncannily like his great-grandfather, I feel like I’ve been granted a chance to set everything right, to repay a debt, to pass on an inheritance of strength, with interest compounded. What I need to do right now is make sure my son is wearing something warm as I place him in a baby carrier against my chest and head out for a walk. A long walk, as far as my legs can take us—at least this tradition I will pass on.
And in the classroom, where I teach literature, I coax a new generation of Canadians to put down roots somewhere, anywhere: Antigone, the Odyssey, Old English poetry, the U-shaped narratives of loss and redemption every English speaker has inherited from the Bible. There are days when it all feels superfluous and obsolete, when my students look blankly at me as I speak about medieval Indian poetry, resisting any kinship with the army of recent migrants who have flooded Toronto, traveling all the way around the world to deliver takeout and load boxes in warehouses.
Some days the words work as keys, just as they should—regardless of their origin, or my students’. “I have experienced this kind of love,” says a serious-looking young woman, as we read a two-thousand-year-old Tamil poem in translation, captivated by its central image of wild animals lapping a pool of dirty, brackish water in an absent lover’s backyard. Midway through the semester, we read a famous poem by Rabindranath Tagore, about a clerk in colonial Calcutta whose small life is circumscribed by squalor: “Mango skins and stones, jack-fruit pulp / Fish-gills, dead kittens / And God knows what other rubbish / Pile up and rot.” Somehow, precariously, the poem transcends its setting, saved by classical music, by a neighbor who plays runs in the Sindhu Bhairavi raga on his clarinet: “At once the alley is a lie, / False and vile as the ravings of a drunkard.” We sit with this artifact from another language and another city; I talk about the elderly Chinese busker who plays Schubert in downtown Toronto, someone else talks about the ugliness and trash they encounter on their daily commute. I wish there was more to say. But literature will have to do. It remains our most valuable common inheritance across national and cultural lines, the only meaningful form of cosmopolitanism we can readily access that is irreducible to undifferentiated slurry. Even as the old rituals disappear, increasingly replaced by kitsch and fantasy and slop, these hieroglyphs endure—a fragile but secular bulwark against self-forgetting. For the dead outnumber us all—we share this earth with more than a hundred billion phantoms, if you believe the Population Reference Bureau’s calculations. But only the living have the power to turn ghosts into ancestors.
Art credit: Rina Banerjee, Sap of earth n’ blood, leaky, which adaptation may deliver one baby, to clear ethnicity and transparent gender in centre and in likeness of parents, baby by wife, baby by husband from side to side, upon smiling country and unnatural culture appeals to no science or hidden DNA this n that may collect to throttle all these other extreme parts, swallow to swallow until full in silence hollow, 2017. Steel, wood, glass, silver leaf, cowrie shells, sea shells, taxidermy eyes, vintage saris. 368.3 × 254 × 254 cm. © Rina Banerjee. Courtesy of Ota Fine Arts (Singapore / Shanghai / Tokyo).
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.