What Do We Owe the Land We Left?
A diasporic reflection on Panjab, love, and accountability
These days, I’ve been missing Panjab.
Wait, let me start again.
These days, I’ve been missing the version of Panjab that exists in my mind. The imagined one. The remembered one. The one I haven’t stepped foot in for over ten years. I haven’t wandered a bazaar in Kurali, eaten chaat in Khararh, or driven through the wide streets of Chandigarh with my head out the window like I used to. I haven’t seen the farmland that once belonged to my grandfather, though I hold it in my memory as if I’ve walked it a thousand times.
I know it’s changed. Of course, it has. The Panjab I remember isn’t the Panjab that exists anymore. Cities expand, buildings grow taller, and fields shrink. Even language shifts—words slip into English or disappear altogether. I’ve lived long enough to know that nothing stays the way we remember it. Still, I wonder: if I never return, will it always remain this way in my mind? Intact. Untouched. A version of home preserved in memory alone.
That’s the thing about being born in the diaspora. You don’t just leave a place; you inherit distance. Panjab has never been mine in the way it was my parents’. I was born thousands of miles away, in a place where Panjabi was spoken softly at home but not in the world outside. I learned to pronounce “Punjab” the way my teachers said it, without correcting them. I carried a last name that tied me to a history most of my classmates had never heard of.
And yet, despite all that distance—maybe even because of it—I find myself longing for Panjab in a way I don’t quite understand. Not for a specific street or, dish or neighborhood, but for a feeling. A wholeness. A knowing. Something I never truly had but miss anyway.
One thing I always heard growing up was how sacred the mitti—the soil—of Punjab is, how it calls out to those who have left. That idea never left me. Growing up in Canada, I also learned from Indigenous teachings about the sacredness of land, how it holds spirit and memory, and how it deserves reverence. And how could Panjab’s land not be sacred when the feet of saints once walked upon it? When the blood of warriors baptized it? How could it not carry something more than history—something holy?
I don’t think I’ll ever truly be from anywhere else. Canada raised me, but Panjab made me. Even from across oceans and years, I feel the land calling to me. Some nights, when I can’t sleep, I hear it. Not a voice exactly, but a presence. Something in the quiet that reminds me where I come from.
Maybe that’s what it means to carry a homeland inside you. To love a place that time keeps changing. To belong, even when you’re far away. To listen when the land calls you back—not because you remember it perfectly, but because you know it’s part of you, even if you’ve never fully stood in it.
Still, I worry. And I get angry. At myself, and at others in the diaspora. We treat Panjabi like an accessory, not a responsibility. We flaunt it when it’s fashionable, when it makes us feel bold or rooted or cool. Panjab becomes our playground. A place to do wedding shopping for cheap, to film TikToks in fields, to show off a lifestyle that proves we’ve made it. We romanticize the soil but forget the people still standing in it.
And somehow, we have the audacity to complain when international students flood foreign countries in search of the same dream we used to escape. We plaster “PB” on our license plates, blast songs about jatt pride out of car windows, and boast about culture. But when Panjab hurts, we fall silent. We scroll past the news. Let the farmers sit and die in protest. Let the bandi singhs rot in prison. What is it to us? Panjab is just our vacation spot.
This is the truth I wrestle with. My love for Panjab is real, but love without responsibility is decoration. And maybe what the land has been asking of me, quietly and insistently, is not just to remember it, but to reckon with it. To speak. To show up. To learn what it means to belong not just in memory, but in action.
In the West, we talk boldly about Panjab’s future. We speak of Khalistan with pride and conviction. The word carries longing, weight, and history. But once, someone asked me, “If Khalistan were formed, would you go and live there?”
And I had no answer. I still don’t.
The question haunts me. I know how much comfort the West has given me. I’ve built a life surrounded by convenience, stability, modernity. There’s a part of me that wonders if I would last even a few months without those things. Maybe I’ve grown too soft, too used to ease. But then I remember: I am a Sikh. And Guru Nanak’s baani reminds me that comfort can be a barrier to truth. That detachment from ease is not loss, but awakening.
I wonder if giving up these comforts, returning to the land of the Gurus, living simply and with intention—would that make me more steady in spirit? Would I feel closer to God?
These are the questions that follow me at night. The contradictions I carry. The longing, the guilt, the deep ache of not knowing how to belong to a land I’ve never fully lived in, but one that lives fully in me.
Still, I dream of Panjab. I let the memory keep blooming inside me, even if it’s not entirely real. Maybe that’s what it means to be diasporic—not rootless, but rooted in something you carry, even if you can’t always name it.
