To My Babies

The smell of freshly baked bread permeated their family home, under the plain ordinary doors and out on to the plain ordinary street and through that deep breath into your soul. The house was warm and welcoming, with years of love, knowledge and guidance being handed out. It was the school holidays, and she was laughing and baking with her grandma, again. It was a family recipe, and how to execute it perfectly was being passed down to another generation. Mmmm, the smell of fresh bread… I wonder if that is what heaven smells like?

I love watching Masterchef Australia. I’ll be honest I haven’t watched every episode, but I’ve watched enough. But it is always bittersweet for me when the contestants or chefs say they learnt their love of food from their mums, dads, aunts or nonnas/grandmas. Don’t get me wrong, I love the idea and I am so happy that they had that opportunity. Unfortunately for me, I never had that.

I am a first-generation immigrant to Australia, and my grandparents were all back in India. Look, I understand that it is always challenging for whoever leaves their home town/city and family/friends. However, sometimes there are compelling reasons to do so. Nowadays, technology has enabled fast worldwide communication, which happens in real-time. I don’t know if the kids these days or in the future will need to experience what I did. My parents would write telegrams sent by sea mail, and I don’t even know if anyone wrote that often. I had grandparents as a theoretical and ideological concept.  I didn’t really have a relationship with them, and unfortunately for me, that is a void that just wasn’t filled.

Add on to that the pressure to succeed in a new country, and you will see how much of my family’s culture and knowledge just didn’t get passed down to me. I was born in Kenya and my first language was Swahili, which I think was a cool tidbit. However, when we moved to Australia, my parents wanted me to know and speak English well. So they never taught me their childhood language, nor did they continue talking to me in Swahili. Oh, we had a splattering of foreign words used for various everyday things, but I still don’t always know which language the words come from. My Dad knows four languages, my Mum knew at least three, but I can only speak one.

We migrated to Australia in the mid-1970s, soon after the White Australia Policy was abolished. (Looking around Australia these days, it is inconceivable that this ever existed). We settled in a small mining town, owned and run by the mining company. If you didn’t work for the mining company, you didn’t live there. When someone was old enough to retire, they moved away, usually to the city.  I didn’t even realise until I was well into adulthood that I hadn’t really been around grandparent age people. We were the only Indians I knew living in that town. My family would socialise with people from our church and many immigrants regardless of their nationality – growing up, our closest family friends were from Singapore and Fiji. My childhood had a distinct lack of my parents culture and grandparents.

I migrated to Australia before I was two, and at least in my mind, I was first and foremost Australian. When I was naughty as a little kid, my Dad would threaten to take me back to India / Africa, so for me, it just seemed like a punishment. When I was a teenager and would meet kids I hadn’t grown up with, occasionally they would say, “Go back to your own country”. I don’t know if they can understand how confusing that was to me. I didn’t belong back in the country my parents or I was born in. I know I wouldn’t have been readily accepted there because my thinking was too different, too Australian. Australia was my home, not even an adopted home because I knew no other place.

Phew! All this to get to my purpose of writing this blog!  I want to tell my kids what I know, what I have learnt and things I have pondered about.  Don’t get me wrong, I spend more time with my kids than most. But I know for myself someone will mention something and because it isn’t relevant to me at that moment in time, I dismiss it. Later on, when I am interested in it, I’m often confused why I didn’t hear, know or remember it. We are in a day and age of information overload.  Information is easily accessible at our fingertips (more specifically, our thumbs), on every screen we look at and through the soundwaves. So we tend to push out more information than we can take in. I wanted something that my kids and maybe even my grandkids could refer to later on. I’m not going to limit myself, so some things may date with time, but I hope it helps them in the future.

So my babies (even if half of you are already adults), this is for you, with all my love.