Exile, As Inherited
Some people are born into a home. I was born into the absence of one.
I grew up far from the valley my parents describe with a certainty that makes distance feel temporary as if the place still waits for us just a few roads away. They remember it as something intimate: the angle of winter sunlight through a window, a neighbourhood that felt like extended family. I listen and feel the outline of a belonging I never touched.
My grandparents do not dwell on the night they left. They speak instead about the ordinary life that ended mid-routine; work postponed indefinitely, conversations left unfinished. For them, displacement was not travel. It was severance. But they rebuilt. They seeded fragments of home wherever space allowed. A plant grown with soil-memory, a recipe recalled through instinct.
They held on, not to nostalgia alone, but to continuity.
My parents inherited that endurance. They watched their parents turn temporary shelters into permanent lives. They saw recovery, but also something fragile beneath it. A longing that never fully calmed. Their grief appears in subtler places: in the way my father insists on the original pronunciation of our surname, even if no one else gets it right; in the way my mother looks away when she sees a map replacing familiar names with unfamiliar ones.
When temples, streets, neighbourhoods are renamed, it unsettles them.
Not because names alone define belonging but because names hold stories.
Erase the story, and a part of identity becomes disposable.
Yet beneath that discomfort lies a confidence they rarely state aloud:
the spiritual essence of a place is not altered by what we choose to call it.
Maps can be rewritten, but memory refuses revision.
Truth can be buried; it does not disappear.
It learns to wait.
Places remember.
Even when people try to forget.
Maybe this is what my elders are waiting for. Not a dramatic restoration, but the moment when what they lived is acknowledged again as fact, not footnote.
And here I am. The generation raised in the in-between.
The one who didn’t witness the rupture but feels responsible for the repair.
I notice absence more sharply than presence.
The festivals I know only in fragments.
The language I understand but hardly speak.
The home that feels familiar but remains foreign.
The missing elements force me to confront my own questions:
Who am I without what they lost?
How much of my identity is built from second- hand experiences and inherited memories?
But even in that uncertainty, I see clearly what they preserved.
Dignity, faith, truth, perhaps carried without applause. As living responsibilities.
So, I am not only inheriting their sorrow.
I am inheriting their correctness.
Their exile did not nullify our belonging.
Their loss does not demand my silence.
Their wait is not my withdrawal.
I may not have lived the exile,
but I will live the recognition.
If the story is told incorrectly,
I must correct it.
Ajanya Kaul
Ajanya Kaul is a budding Sound Designer, Engineer based in Barcelona; carving a niche in immersive audio for film, media and contemporary storytelling formats. He is drawn to sounds that reveal emotion beneath what the screen shows.
6 Comments
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Ajanya Kaul
I’m deeply touched by your words. Thank you for sharing your perspective.. It’s an honor to reflect even a part of what you’ve lived.
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Surrinder Saraf
I am very much impressed with a beautiful and emotional write up, depicting the truthful occurances of leaving our roots and culture behind. We have surely lost something much more than you have mentioned. Stay blessed.
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Ajanya Kaul
Thank you so much for your kind words. I really appreciate your perspective and the thought you’ve shared—it means a lot!
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Minesh Khashu
Thanks Ajanya for sharing this. You speak for thousands and thousands who have inherited exile like you.
Do get in touch.
Since your life is immersed in “sound”, it is perhaps appropriate to view the ‘exile’ from a sound lens as well. Those very familiar sounds, that were close to the hearts of our forefathers, be they the footsteps in the snow, the morning melody of birds, the gush of the lidder river in Pahalgam, the walk through the chinar leaves in the autumn, the oar making contact with the water on a dal lake boat, the busyness of habbakaddal… Above all our kashmiri language faces extinction and one of our most important responsibilities is to make sure we can revive it and make it thrive among our future generations.
🙏
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Ajanya Kaul
Thanks so much! I’d be excited to connect and hear more about your ideas. Exploring this through a sound lens sounds like a fascinating opportunity.
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Sheetal
Reading your piece, I see my own child reflected back at me.
You speak with such clarity about what I have watched unfold across generations: my own rupture, my attempt to rebuild and now the next generation’s burden of inheriting a wound they did not receive firsthand.
I know the weight of what you describe. I lived the night we left. I know the severance, the work of turning temporary shelter into permanent life, the way certain names and places will always ache. But what strikes me most painfully in your words is this: the next generation did not choose to carry this. Yet here they are, feeling responsible for the repair of something they never broke.
I see in your words the generation I hoped would carry the truth forward, not the sorrow. And perhaps that is what survival truly means: that they inherit our correctness, our dignity, our refusal to let the story be told wrong. That is enough.