Sadiya Ansari on In Exile: Rupture, Reunion & My Grandmother’s Secret Lies

In a deeply personal investigation, journalist Sadiya Ansari takes readers across three continents and back a century as she searches towards family secret.

Why did her grandmother Tahira abandon her seven children to follow a man from Karachi to a tiny village in Punjab? And though she eventually left him, Tahira remained estranged from her children for nearly two decades. Who was she in those years when she was no longer a wife or mother? For Sadiya herself, uninterested in marriage and children, the question begets another: What space is available to women who defy cultural expectations?

Through her inquiry, Sadiya discovers what her daadi’s life was like during that separation and she confronts difficult historical truths: the pervasiveness of child marriage, how Partition made refugees of millions of families like hers, and how the national freedoms achieved in 1947 did not extend to women’s lives. She sees the threads of this history woven through each generation after, and finds an unexpected sense of belonging in a culture that, at first, shuns women for wanting lives of their own.

www.pagesofhackney.co.uk/.../in-exile/

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