The Rulers

That's my family tree.

I'm currently 19 years old.
Second child and daughter of a family of 2 parents and four children.
We live in the south of England. But we aren't ethnically English. My family originates from Punjab in Pakistan. And that's what I'll tell about first.

Growing up, I never really had an interest in knowing about my where my family came from. I didn't even know accurately about the partition of British India or as my parents call it, Hindustan. One day I was talking to my friend, who was white, about the animosity between Indians and Pakistanis and they decided to tell everyone in our class that I was racist as a joke because I said and I quote 'we have been brought up to not like India and Indians.' And I do understand why she thought it was racist, but I was pointing out a flaw in my thoughts and wondering why I was thinking that.

After that incident, I lost a close friend because she decided to start a 'most likely to' page on Instagram and I can't even type what she wrote about me because it was so f**king rude. (Pardon my french. I'm British. We like to swear.) I also decided I need to get over this stupid phase of 'I'm English, not Asian' and completely ignoring my heritage to fit in with my friends. I was so whitewashed that I was considering wearing white at my wedding and not playing Punjabi music. THANK GOD I GOT OVER IT.

I bought a book called the 'Partition: The Story of Indian Independence and the Creation of Pakistan in 1947' from a Waterstones in Oxford while I was at summer school. It told me of the horrors that my grandparents and great grandparents endured. But I still didn't feel a connection, and it was just a history book, just facts. That's when I started to read and watch stories of people who lived during the partition. I saw their faces, heard their voices and all I could do was cry. I could see the pain in their eyes, but they didn't speak of their anger or hatred for the others. They spoke of how they were all neighbours, who turned on each other, killing and slaughtering each other, yet were the same people, the same ethnicity. One man said 'those who were one soul became enemies'  I won't go into specifics, but some of the stories I can't shake them, they were horrifying.

All of my grandparents are dead. I've never met my mother's parents because they passed away before I was born actually before my mum married. My father's parents are a vague memory, his father was distant with me and my siblings, there could have been many reasons for that, but we could never know what that man was thinking, he's key to nearly everything that happened in our lives. My father mother was a good memory, she was a cute little woman, but something wasn't right with her, but I was too young to notice.

When speaking to my mother over the past few months, I've found not so many family secrets that now I wish I didn't. It's changed my view on everything, to my family and even my own mental health.