My Grandma, Mai Mai Gee (IP)

When I arrived in Myanmar, the familiarity was immediate and overwhelming. I saw my grandmother in the old women who passed me by, their longyis, Burmese sarongs, brushing against the dust of the streets, their expressions calm, unhurried, always smiling. It wasn't nostalgia—only a deep, unarticulated empathy for a place that had moulded her and, by some extension, had also shaped me.

Her routines, which once seemed rustic and anachronistic in a Croydon suburb, suddenly found their proper context here. I can still see her sitting on a wooden stool/horse made by my Scottish grandfather in the kitchen, the way her hands, dark and lined, worked tirelessly over a rasp, grating the fresh coconut for her magical dessert of sinwinmakin (a semolina cake). The air would fill with the rich, creamy scent of coconut, mingled with spices, in a house where the aroma seemed as out of place as she did. 

She would sit on her sofa, puffing on a Rothmans, her face, chest and arms dusted in the thanaka paste she had ground herself from a special piece of wood on a wetted stone. She didn't do that out of nostalgia or custom, but because this was who she was: an ordinary Burmese grandmother, doing ordinary Burmese things in a land that could scarcely comprehend them.

I was moved to tears not because I was rediscovering my roots, but because I was finally encountering them in their natural state, among people who shared that same quiet dignity I had seen in her.

Yet, there was a curious contradiction in the fact that I would never choose to live here. The sensation of fitting in, of finding something recognisable in the faces of strangers, did not translate into a desire to stay. It was as though I had come not to find a home, but to pay my respects, to acknowledge the lineage that had passed silently through my grandmother’s hands, and then into me. I was a visitor not just to Myanmar, but to a part of myself that had remained dormant and half-understood.

It occurred to me then that home is not always a place where one belongs in a straightforward sense. It is not necessarily the land of one’s birth or the house where one’s ancestors lived. It may exist in a transitory moment, in the understanding exchanged between strangers, or in the shared customs that bridge the gulf of generations. It is a place we carry with us—a feeling that can be stirred by a scent of sandalwood or the sight of an old woman puffing on a big cheroot, just as easily as it can be quelled by the thought of settling permanently in such a place.

In Myanmar, I found that I did not need to live there to feel its imprint on me. The country did not beckon me to stay; it simply offered itself up as an explanation—an answer to a question I had not known I was asking. It was an unspoken affirmation of the woman who had raised me with her Burmese habits intact, as though she had kept the country alive in that white-walled house surrounded by evergreens in England, awaiting the day I would recognise it for myself.