It’s mid-January here in frozen-solid Montreal and minus 30ºC with the wind chill. Naturally, the pipes froze this morning, not just in my home but in hundreds of homes across the city. Not for another week is the temperature here supposed to crawl up to a balmy high of zero…maybe! Under these somewhat frigid circumstances, it’s not easy to believe that a few short weeks ago, one could have been in a place where the temperature is never less than 30ºC above the freezing point, as is the case in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where I spent ten days last November on the way to Kolkata in December 2019.
I want to write, nearly did write, “on the way home” to Kolkata. I stopped myself. It isn’t my home; hasn’t been since I was eighteen months old. I came to Canada for the first time in 1960 as an Indian-born Indian child on my father’s Indian passport. If my mother had given birth in Calcutta (as it was spelled then) any time after 1977 rather than in 1958, she would have passed on her Canadian nationality to her child through the principle of jus sanguinis, “law of the blood.” However, between 1947 and 1977, for children born abroad to Canadian parents, “Canadian citizenship could only be passed down by Canadian fathers when born in wedlock, or Canadian mothers when born out of wedlock.” The law, in other words, was sexist; children of legally married Canadian women living abroad could not inherit their mother’s nationality, only their father’s. It was not until age eight that I was naturalized, along with my father.
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