Where is She Today

PROMPT:  This prompt came from the group scanning a set of books and picking out titles or phrases that jumped out. The phrases that Sabrina wrote from: ‘a tourist in your own town’ and ‘where is home’.

Where is She Today – by Sabrina Dias

Where is she today?  Sometimes as she walks up her street of nine years, this thought pops into her head: “Does this feel like my home?” Or she asks herself “Have I really lived her this long? So why am I still asking myself if this feels like my home?”  She finds this very bizarre. She is happy, she is content; life is very good for her. Neither she nor her husband is jobless, nor are they suffering from any terrible illnesses. They have no children so life is relatively calm and uncomplicated. But where is home then?

She is brown; her husband is white.

She is a woman; most of her colleagues are men.

She is the daughter of immigrants, an Indian couple who came here from Karachi.

She speaks English, not Hindi, nor Urdu, nor Konkani, nor any other of the many languages of India.

She doesn’t wear a sari; she wears jeans, lululemons and capris.

She doesn’t know how to make a chapatti, nor a dosa, nor other fantastic Indian dishes very well, but she tries now.

She has only been one time to India.

In India, she is brown and her husband is white.

In India, she is the daughter of immigrants, an Indian couple who went to Canada from Karachi.

In India, she is brown-skinned woman amongst thousands of brown-skinned people in the street. And her husband is white.

In India, she speaks English, not Hindi.

So where is home?

Today she sits at a table with five women. All are writing, pen to paper. They are warm, and soft, and open. There is one language here, it seems. One colour.  One age. There is one common, shared goal here. Or rather, it is a shared feeling. There is an absence that she feels here though. Where is the pressure to find that specific element, to tug at it and identify its place in her self, or identify herself as she may be in this place?