Gabrielle Ho­sein

Syed Ab­dul Az­iz's sto­ry in­trigued me.Not on­ly be­cause he was my great, great-grand­fa­ther, not on­ly be­cause he changed des­tinies in that cross­ing from Cal­cut­ta, but be­cause he was known to have come from Afghanistan.

I was in­trigued by how lit­tle is doc­u­ment­ed about Afghans who dis­solved in­to the ho­moge­nous iden­ti­ty now known as In­do-Trinida­di­an, who nonethe­less ap­peared with in­sis­tent counter-nar­ra­tives amongst hand­ed-down fam­i­ly lore in the Mus­lim com­mu­ni­ty.Who were these Afghans? Why did they come? What routes did they trav­el? How could we, as their de­scen­dants, tell a tale from the new world to chal­lenge con­tem­po­rary glob­al stereo­types?

What was the sig­nif­i­cance of the fact that Az­iz sent his daugh­ter, Ayesha, my great grand­moth­er, to school in the first decade of the cen­tu­ry, rais­ing her to be lit­er­ate in Ara­bic, Ur­du and Eng­lish? What is the sig­nif­i­cance of her liv­ing, work­ing and pray­ing in her orhi­ni, nev­er in hi­jab?

This daugh­ter of an Afghan-born, Mus­lim leader in Trinidad could tell us about an au­then­tic­i­ty and tra­di­tion dif­fer­ent from mod­ern fun­da­men­tal­ist ver­sions. And, what would that mean for me, and for oth­er fam­i­ly who long de­fined our­selves by this lega­cy?

As I traced Az­iz's steps, seek­ing proof in colo­nial doc­u­ments, each find­ing led to more ques­tions, and I be­gan to think less of his mi­gra­tions than of my own roller­coast­er of emo­tions as the old pho­tos I hoped to scour were in some uniden­ti­fied lo­ca­tion in the Princes Town Re­gion­al Cor­po­ra­tion, or as I fi­nal­ly, in sha'al­lah, reached the knowl­edge trove I sought.

Eu­phor­i­cal­ly, I sat in Maulaana Mustapha Ke­mal Hy­dal's bal­cony, my in­sides flut­ter­ing in Freeport's breeze as much as the pho­to­copy he held of Az­iz's au­to-bi­og­ra­phy, writ­ten in Ur­du, more than pos­si­bly in Az­iz's own hand, and giv­en to Ke­mal by his moth­er's un­cle, Az­iz's son Yusuf. In all my search­ing for any of Syed Ab­dul Az­iz's own pos­ses­sions, fi­nal­ly, this sin­gle page.

It says that Az­iz was born in the Haz­ara dis­trict in the ward of Mansehra in In­dia, said Ke­mal, who trans­lat­ed the page him­self.I was aghast. The planned book project falling from my fin­ger­tips like crys­tal shat­ter­ing.

Yet pieces that had made no sense im­me­di­ate­ly fit to­geth­er, such as why Az­iz's in­den­ture­ship record said he was from La­hore, and why he held a post in the British army, with a month­ly pay of 14 ru­pees, meals and uni­form, in the sec­ond An­glo-Afghan war.The fam­i­ly is Hu­sai­ni, ex­tend­ing through 30 record­ed gen­er­a­tions to the Prophet Mo­hammed, said that sin­gle page. They left the Ara­bi­an penin­su­la in 728 CE, set­tling in what was then In­dia and is now Pak­istan.

No, said Ke­mal de­ci­sive­ly, Az­iz was not Afghan. Mar­veling that one piece of pa­per could so dis­sem­ble my con­struct­ed sense of self, and won­der­ing at how I spec­tac­u­lar­ly failed to an­tic­i­pate this risk of jour­ney­ing in­to the past, I strug­gled to ac­cept that every ref­er­ence I found, in books, on Web sites and in the­ses, all con­firm­ing the Afghan con­nec­tion, was based on repet­i­tive ci­ta­tions of an orig­i­nal mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion.

But, how could this be the first time we are hear­ing this, my moth­er skep­ti­cal­ly asked, and why then did Ayesha her­self talk about her fa­ther as Afghan?Again, an­swers beget­ting ques­tions.That same day, as I was about to be­come more In­di­an than ever be­fore, I learned that my fa­ther's great grand­fa­ther, who came from Hy­der­bad, said his fam­i­ly was orig­i­nal­ly from Afghanistan. So too, an an­ces­tor of my fa­ther's moth­er.

Now wary of oral and pub­lished his­to­ries, even of­fi­cial records, I'm left with Afghan ori­gins on all sides which I've no idea how to ver­i­fy.Could I be more Afghan than Syed Ab­dul Az­iz him­self? How iron­ic, even ab­surd. Such plot twists are not for the faint-heart­ed as I pur­sue this sto­ry's fi­nal word.