The Edge of Space

A facet of immigration that is lost on commentators when they idealise the many reasons why people from distant shores come over and make lives in the West is the need for atonement. It is a hard concept to articulate for many immigrants because atonement, or the idea that one confronts active or passive realities and makes peace with them with humility and emotional reparation, brings with it a whole host of remembrances that are ideally best buried. It is the beginning of something to emigrate, certainly, but also the end of something else... and this every migrant knows.
Being brought up middle-class in a third-world country makes one self-centred - the competition for resources, opportunities, love, leisure, etc., are well understood and dissected around the world, even sometimes to the immigrant's advantage. Everywhere one goes as a local in the third world, the worst of us must be indulged if we are to get ahead of someone else. Occupations are remunerated not for the value they bestow on society, but on their ability to make someone else much richer than you'll ever be. In this cauldron of conceit it is natural that social markers of privilege are accentuated rather than hidden because they could give you an edge over someone else in an universal marketplace of one-upmanship. What ends when one migrates to the West is the need to sustain a fundamental fiction - that one actually deserved to be better off than the billion-plus souls one has left behind. It isn't necessary anymore to believe that you are a master of your destiny... because you have escaped it. It isn't necessary to fuel your self-belief by ritualising and fetishising your differences... because they really don't matter any longer. It isn't necessary to dismiss your faculty with language, your ambition, your idea of success, the sacrifices that the many people in your family and wider community made on your behalf over the course of your lifetime... because in your adopted country in the West you will always only ever be exotic. It isn't even necessary to think that you're smarter than anyone else and that your genes or antecedents have made you the manifest fulfilment of the sum of your entire clan's historically consolidated hopes and dreams... because the sustained weight of that much expectation will very likely drive you to insanity.
What one atones for is much more tangible - the sense that here, finally, is a place where I can look at myself in all my imperfection and know that it is only chance that mattered in the end. There is no reason your erstwhile; servant, driver, maid, cook or cleaner couldn't have been you - it was and remains pure dumb luck that you are where you are now. The impetus for your hard work over the years, the drive to achieve things by virtue of dedication and application, the fuel for your success... could have been shared by every other person you ever came into contact with over the course of your time in the country you grew up in; that is the reality.
My family and I are on the cusp of gaining citizenship in a foreign country. It is a country with a complicated history and a whole host of dark phantoms that are continually being dredged up from a hoary past that it must confront. It is also a country with a whole host of current challenges, the responses to which may very well determine whether it still remains a viable, sustainable, and enjoyable place to live in in the years to come. For me, though, it is a country in which I can see most clearly that I am a product of the immense privilege that my home country has given me, without which I would be just another statistic; a stranger with strange looks and a strange accent; an outlier; an anomaly; just another curiosity in a new world of impenetrable diversity. The debt I owe that idea of India can barely be measured, let alone repaid, but I can see now the fullness of my perversity - the manifest injustices and the criminal neglect I perpetuated on so many people I have now left behind forever. I can now see that a society can only ever be measured by the conditions of life of its most disadvantaged, most vulnerable, most needy individuals. I know now that when one turns his/her back on someone in pain and suffering, one turns their back on a version of themselves.
I can acknowledge now, in the full light of an antipodean summer, that it simply isn't enough to understand that life is unfair - we must work towards a reality when it need not be.