A New Yorker’s genealogical sleuthwork in search of her buried Jewish past in Bombay
It’s a terrible topic, Jews. Terrible topic,” says crotchety Uncle Moses, Sadia Shepard’s first point of contact with the Bene Israel community in India, “change topics.” This is much before the Jews of Bombay face their persecution of 26/11, much before the Jews of Chabad House are killed.

Despite Moses’ warning, Shepard does not change the topic. Her Fulbright project on the supposed “lost tribe” of Israel is really an exercise in genealogical sleuthwork. The New Yorker has come to India to excavate her grandmother’s buried Jewish past in Bombay. Her beloved Nana — who married a Pakistani Muslim, raised her children in Karachi and then moved to Boston with her daughter and American son-in-law — was once the centre of little Sadia’s world. Nana is fiercely loving, but enigmatic at some level. Even as she tells her granddaughter stories, they are filled with troubling gaps and silences. And how did she, Rachel Jacobs, become Rahat Siddiqi?

After Nana’s death, Shepard is consumed by the hunger to know her own history and to keep the promise she made her Nana — “to walk backwards, to find the paths” her grandmother didn’t choose. Towards the end of her life, her grandmother seemed haunted by the Jewish heritage she had abandoned at 17 when she married a much older Muslim man, and her stories wistfully hint at her dissatisfactions and what-might-have-beens. She could have stayed in India after Partition, she could have chosen her community over her domineering husband, she could have forged an entirely different fate. Her long-distance attempts to set up and maintain a home in Pakistan are heartbreaking, as an effort to maintain some sense of autonomy even as she is ensconced in the deep peace of a close, loving family.

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