The Hurricane Motel: Essays from a desi daughter of South Florida
Creators: name: Ramishah Maruf
Publisher: name: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill University Libraries
Year: 2021

description: My grandfather was a traveler, though not one by choice. His life began in a village in Utter Pradesh, then Calcutta for university a 30-hour train ride away. After his studies, a new country called Pakistan formed seemingly overnight — the Bengalis in the eastern territory and the rest of Pakistan thousands of miles away. Nana, an Urdu-speaking Pakistani, chose to live in the East in its capital Dhaka. A bloody secession war broke out the year before Mama was born and in the middle of the night he found himself in Lahore with his young wife, my nani. 

Toward the end of his life he was with us, in a suburb outside of Fort Lauderdale. For once in his life it was quiet. On the edge of the Everglades he held my brother in his lap and pointed to the egrets basking near the canal in the mornings, an unlit cigarette in his mouth. Standing next to him was a granddaughter who knew him as a stranger for most of her life, only able to communicate in broken Urdu. I would later learn he was in Calcutta for his Master’s in English, though he chose not to speak much of it. He died a few years later in Lahore; the city he raised his four children in, who now live on four different continents. 

Nana inherited my people’s trauma, one imposed on us by years and years of colonization. One that has upended an entire generation, who witnessed trains full of people trying to cross an artificial border slaughtered, families separated for decades, ancestral homes abandoned in the middle of the night. People already divided by religion and caste now further separated by an artificial border drawn overnight by a white man. The Americans came back for round two, drone striking children the same age as my youngest cousins. 

My Nana is a product of that, floating from country to country, a different visa every decade. He spent his last years surrounded by white people — migrants to Florida themselves but from Long Island. They leered at him when he walked around our gated neighborhood in his sarong, hands behind his back, belly and chin pointed up to the sky as if he was talking to someone beyond the clouds. He died as a dark-skinned man surrounded by Punjabis, who are known for their fair skin tone. Mama did not make it back to Lahore in time for his funeral. When they treated him at the hospital did they know the man he was? Or did they, just like the Americans, think he was dirty too? 

I wish I could ask him what he thought of his homeland, if he even thought he had one. Because to me, our homeland was taken from us the day the British stepped foot on our land, intending to loot us, pillage us and divide us. Our presence in the West is transactional. We are here because you were there, as the writer Suketu Mehta said.

There are days where I feel like my family is an imported good, transported in a cargo ship like the Pakistani towels my dad sells to Miami resorts for a living. An item used by everyone until it is deemed dirty, cast aside in the bathroom floor’s corner until it is ready to be put through the wringer. Then there are days where we feel so Floridian that it seems as if we fell from the top of the coconut tree itself; brown on the outside, milky white on the inside. Regardless, it seems we are here to stay. My dad has finally paid off our little home in the gated community with the leering white neighbors and says he will never move again.