96 chApter three
acies far exceeded our own. Despite my father’s protests, we moved into
what would become my mother’s decades- long preoccupation: restoring,
improving, and preserving a small space of the earth and its minor histories.
The lore of my family casts me as a difficult child, signaled unabashedly
by the nickname “the little tornado”—a name bestowed on me during the
one and only visit from my Babu Uncle, my father’s brother from whom
he was mostly estranged. My mother sketches the scene of a preverbal me
tearing out my hair in frustration (from where this frustration emerges is
conspicuously absent from the narrative) and offering it to her in menacing
handfuls. I was a no- less- difficult teen—suspended regularly from school,
remiss in class participation and attendance, and impatient with the con-
fines of my world.
But there is a singular story couched within this family lore, and it is a
story that I have always quietly cherished whenever my mother feels com-
pelled to share it. It is the story of my inaugural act as a “humanitarian”:
I was perhaps five years old (in the narrative, I am always younger) when,
wandering home alone after visiting a friend, I saw a white man in tattered
clothing eating out of a neighbor’s garbage can. I was shocked at the sight
and understood that I had a responsibility to act. I ran home in tears and
pleaded with my mother to help, which she did readily. We brought him
home and sat together in the backyard eating homemade pizza, learning
the details of how he had come to be scavenging for discarded food in our
affluent neighborhood. As it turned out, he was a ward of the province liv-
ing in a group home for people with “mental deficiencies” in a neighbor-
hood adjacent to ours. My mother would come to discover that his over-
seers had left their wards alone for a long holiday weekend without anyone
present to distribute food and medications.
For all the ways in which I would or could not conform, for all of my bad
behavior within the narrative remembering of our shared family history,
this was my narrative of redemption. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that it
became profoundly influential to my own self- formation, to how I learned
to read myself in relation to the more negative (and indeed more frequent)
narratives that circulated within the family. This redemptive narrative was
one that propped me up against an errant past; humanitarianism became
for me a kind of refuge from the tornado that had otherwise defined me.
Through my readings of the recurring humanitarian figures of post-
colonial literature, I began to return again and again to this redemptive