Indo-Trinidadians yearn for their Indian roots |
When Kamla Persad Bissessar visited India as the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago in January 2012, there was something life-altering in store for her.In Bhelpur, a dusty remote village in Bihar`s Buxar district, about 1,00,000 people had gathered to see her and greet her. One of them was Jagdish Mishra, an uncle she had never even heard of. There were many more relatives, including women and children, in the decrepit Mishra household, who were probably her uncles, aunts, cousins, nephews and nieces. When Bissessar reached Bhelpur, the village witnessed remarkably emotional scenes. She, for the first time, was discovering her bloodline in this part of the world, thousands of miles away from her country, across the Atlantic and Indian oceans. A lineage she knew certainly existed, but didn`t know where, or how to trace. Overcome with a sense of disbelief and joy, the stately Bissessar and members of the modest Mishra household hugged each other and cried even as the villagers showered her with flowers and raised slogans such as “Kamla Persad zindabad”. It was a rare homecoming and the reunion of an Indian family that had stayed apart for more than a century, that too in two distant continents, without knowing the other existed.
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