Скачать или смотреть ‘Exile is not just distance, it is dispossession’: Aatish Taseer on love, loss & the right to return

Watch the full interview: https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/08/2...

In Return to Self, Aatish Taseer confronts the personal cost of exile: the impossibility of returning home to India after his Overseas Citizen of India card was revoked in 2019.

Speaking to Abhinandan Sekhri, Taseer recalls the moment of his grandmother’s passing. Unable to travel back, he did what he could: sat in an Indian restaurant abroad, letting memory stand in for ritual. Four days into a trip to Sri Lanka, his mother had come to meet him there, while, back in Delhi, the last rites took place without him.

When asked whether the experience stirred anger or bitterness, he does not equivocate. “No, I have that anger,” he says. “It’s not entirely personal; it comes out of a love for India. I want the nightmare of this regime to be over. But more than that, it’s the anger of dispossession.”

For him, exile is not just a question of geography but of erasure. “I lived thirty out of forty years of my life in India,” he explains. “I grew up with my cousins, I went to school with them. There’s this whole world of experience and belonging that you’re suddenly told, in five minutes, doesn’t count for anything. Your closest relationships, the foundation of your creativity and your emotional life, you’re robbed of them.”

The loss, he suggests, is at once ordinary and profound. “My mother said to me, ‘It’s no big deal. You’re not missing anything. It’s just cousins gathering, drinking whiskey, remembering Nani.’ And I was thinking, it’s such a small thing if you have it, and it’s such a big thing if you’re dispossessed of it. I grew up in her house, and for her to pass without a single rite of closure for me, it creates a world in which you feel like nothing matters.”

Exile, like the book itself, is not only about leaving a place, but about what is taken away when one is denied the chance to return.

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