From Place to Place to Place

In 1972, when she was a teenager, Tania Das Gupta travelled with her parents from Kolkata, India, to Toronto, for what was supposed to be a five-year stay. During the journey, she was struck by the sight of rural migrants — all men — who were heading to another destination entirely: the Gulf countries of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. “Their mannerisms were different from those of us urbanites,” she recalls in Twice Migrated, Twice Displaced. “Many squatted on the floors of waiting rooms at the airport and carried unusual hand luggage, commonly seen on railway platforms in India, such as bedding and shiny new buckets and cooking utensils.” Now a professor at York University, Das Gupta knows that “home is not a fixed place” for such men and for many other South Asian families who have been separated through successive migrations, from India or Pakistan, then to the Gulf nations, then to Canada, and often back...