It is probably a reflection of my narcissism that my first reaction upon hearing that the man arrested for last month’s Times Square bombing plot was an American of Pakistani origin, was to wonder what this might mean for my application for an Indian employment visa. Although, that’s a bit misleading: these days (that is to say, four months after I submitted my papers), just about everything leads me to wonder about my visa application.
It wasn’t always thus: once upon a time, back in the days before David Headley, American citizens like me could count on getting a visa within two or three weeks the first time they travelled to India, and within two or three days on subsequent visits. These days the security clearance process is of indeterminate length. This would be my cue to saying that I feverishly hope that clearance will be forthcoming now that Indian investigators have finally gotten access to Headley. But given my first paragraph, you already knew that, didn’t you?
Let me back up. American citizens “like me” is a somewhat complicated concept in my case. I was born and raised in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, and am a naturalised US citizen. Growing up — that is to say prior to my naturalisation — and to this day, I have regarded myself as inextricably bound to India. To its politics. To its films (not just in Hindi, but also in Tamil, Malayalam and Telugu). And god knows, to its cricket, and the heartbreaks associated with it, especially in the fourth innings of Test matches. (The pain associated with tragedies like Bangalore ’05, against Pakistan, or Mumbai ’06, against England, or Karachi ’06 is all the greater when one has braved time zones to stay up all night in New York to watch the implosion live.) This does not pose any kind of identity crisis or conflict with my US citizenship, but is simply the contemporary reality of hyphenated Americanness: the Irish, the Italians, and Jewish immigrants over the decades have paved the way for newer waves, comfortable in (at least) two worlds, and not required to give up either. So far so good, but as with so many immigrants from the Indian subcontinent, my life isn’t just marked by the passage to the US. Its contours are also, and implacably, shaped by the 1947 fault line. I used to be a citizen of Pakistan prior to becoming an American.
Rooting for the Indian cricket team while carrying a Pakistani passport and lapsing into “we” when others meant “them” might seem odd, and I certainly wouldn’t be the one to say it’s anything like common. But 1947’s detritus makes certain oddities more likely among Urdu-speaking Muslims than among others; types that, even if they are uncommon, are encountered only among them. The Urdu-speaker knows, perhaps is even related to, all of them: the hyper-nationalistic, Nehruvian anti-Pakistani, committed to maintaining India as the un-Pakistan, perhaps with a childhood scarred by the vanishing of half a family to the other side. The cricket traitor, rooting for the other team — but never able to meet anyone from that side of the border without succumbing to the temptation of a barb about how bad it is Over There. The prosperous relative from Karachi, oblivious to the condescension in his reaction when he hears his hosts in Hyderabad won’t have dancing, and will have sex-segregated seating, at the family wedding. The engineer from Meerut forced to migrate (his protestations overruled by his parents’ view that there were no prospects for Muslims in the India of a couple of decades ago), to join his siblings who have, by now, all left for Canada, the US, South Africa, or the UK, leaving him stuck in Karachi as an illustration of a perverse joke, the punch line to which seems obscure. And many more beside. No community has a monopoly on Partition’s legacy, but the figure of the Urdu-speaking Muslim incarnates that history in an especially unfinished way. Whatever the time, one hand of the clock points to 1947.
It took the diaspora to present “the other” as a banal fact to the post-1947 generation. Once hundreds of thousands of desis, of this or that country, owing allegiance to this or that god, appeared in the English-speaking world and in the petro-states of the Gulf, Over There ceased to be simply a political fact or family condition manifesting itself every two years. It became an everyday reality, in schools, offices, all manner of places. Nor could one delude oneself that it was reducible to communal identity: certainly not where Malayalee Muslims rubbed shoulders with Pashtuns; Chicago Hyderabadis with Punjabis. And if most people did no more than replicate the cartography of the motherland, distance — and, where available, the privileges afforded by naturalisation — meant another orientation, one where the border was contingent, became possible.
Traffic can run both ways, however. No one seems to have known this better than David Headley and the Lashkar, who used precisely Headley’s diasporic position — as an American citizen of Pakistani descent, he was able to travel, not only in the US and Pakistan, but also in India — to facilitate terrorism. Nuance has been one of the first casualties of the discovery, potentially reducing those “like me” to no more than the passport I once carried. I suppose this isn’t any officialdom’s fault — government bureaucracies are especially ill-suited to nuance, let alone to telepathy — and in the context of the subcontinent’s bloody turmoil, visa limbo for a few (or many) immigrant desis who saw in the naturalisation process an opportunity not just to find a new world, but to engage more fluidly with their old, does not, as tragedies go, make the grade. With the result that in a little over a month, when India’s first Test match begins in Sri Lanka, I’ll still be watching, and hoping Dhoni’s boys do a better job of tackling Mendis this time around. Only it will likely be from New York, late at night, nine-and-a-half hours behind.

Umair A. Muhajir is a lawyer based in New York City. He blogs at http://qalandari.blogspot.com.