A void waiting to be filled

Finding home in India, 1997.

In November 1996, Kirsty (my then girlfriend, now wife) and I started dating. I was completely smitten. By any reasonable measure, I was a 19-year old in the grip of new love, and the world felt smaller and more urgent because of it.

My parents had other plans. They’d been organizing a trip to India for February. My cousin Dipple was getting married in Jalandhar, Punjab, and my whole maternal side of the family would be there. I was supposed to go. I was in my second year at CEGEP (college in Quebec), and the plan was to take the entire Winter semester off. In retrospect, it was bold of my parents to let me do that. But at that time, all I could think about was Kirsty. I didn’t want to leave.

I remember talking to my brother Anurag about it. He’s four years old than me, and he kept pushing back on my hesitation.

“You have to go,” he insisted. “This is going to be a life changing experience.”

I didn’t believe him. I was too lost in love to see what he saw.

But he was right.

When I arrived in India, I felt the weight of a culture I’d only ever heard about through my parents’ stories or saw in Bollywood films. Growing up in Canada, I’d never been quite sure who I was. Was I Indian? Canadian? Quebecois? The question has always hung there, unresolved… I never felt like I really belonged anywhere.

Stepping off that plane in Delhi, I knew I definitely was not Indian. They called me a “farangi.” A foreigner. It was disorienting. But then something shifted. As I spent time with my family, meeting cousins and aunts and uncles I’d only known as distant (and heavily delayed) voices on the phone, something inside me began to settle. There was a void I didn’t even know I had, and slowly, it was being filled. Being around them, immersed in the language and the warmth of my family and heritage, I started to feel complete in a way I never had before. Part of me that had always been missing was finally coming home.

Before the trip, I’d decided I wanted to buy an instrument. I played bass in a band back in Montreal, but something about India made me want to explore beyond that. The sitar felt right… an instrument that belonged to this part of my identity I was just beginning to reclaim. My brother wanted to pick up a pair of tablas. So, one afternoon, my cousin Poppy (real name Sargam, but everyone has “pet” names in India) and I headed to a music shop we found in the Yellow Pages, Bhatia Musicals. My memory’s kind of fuzzy, but I recall walking in and Poppy immediately taking charge. She was about a year older than me, twenty to my nineteen, and she had a confidence I didn’t possess. She leaned into it with the shopkeeper, putting on this superior attitude like she knew exactly what we were doing.

“No, no, no,” she’d say as we looked around. “We should get this. Pundit Ji said we shouldn’t pay more than that.”

Not sure what Pundit Ji she was speaking of and I’m pretty sure the shopkeeper wasn’t buying it. But in the end, I walked out with a student model sitar in a cardboard box. It wasn’t fancy, but it was mine.

Back at my cousin’s place that afternoon, I remember the moment my aunt Rekha saw the sitar. She was my mom’s younger sister, with a masters degree in Hindustani classical vocal, and when she looked at what I’d bought, her whole face lit up. She’d known me my whole life; she and my uncle and cousins Poppy and Puneet had lived in Cuba for years before , visiting us often in Canada. We were close. But this moment felt different. There was something in the way she looked at me, something encouraging and almost reverential. She saw something in me, I think. Maybe she saw the same hunger I was beginning to feel. She handed me a cassette.

“Listen to this,” she said.

It was Ravi Shankar.

I remember how that moment felt: heavy, significant, like she was passing something down to me. Like maybe she was my guardian angel, showing me the way forward. I took the cassette back to Canada with me, and it would become the soundtrack to everything that followed.