I’m Indian, English and live in Scotland. Will my son’s identity be as borderless after the referendum?
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Version 0 of 1. Eighteen years ago I made the journey from England to Scotland for the first time. Euston to Glasgow Central on a pre-tilting train that in those days took seven long, increasingly cold hours to reach its destination. I was 18 years old, had never been further north than York, had no connection to anything beyond the border, and yet I was moving to Scotland. At Carlisle, I thought we must surely be there. When we crossed the actual border, I didn’t even notice. I was a typical London teenager of the mid-90s: obsessed with Trainspotting, highly suspicious of the Highlands, and inappropriately dressed in what was then known as a “body” but was, in fact, a giant baby vest. By the time I got off the train, Glasgow had stolen my heart. The thrill of coming into the city over the Clyde, where two thirds of the world’s ships were once built. Central station, an ostentatious Victorian queen, crowned with the largest glass roof in the world through which the saddest skies were visible. And beneath the railway bridge, at a street level that felt subterranean, the reek of overworked chip fat. Appetising when drunk, stomach-churning at any other time, and as dependable as an old friend coming to collect you from the station. Every time I have arrived in Glasgow since that day, it has felt like coming home. I still live in Scotland, having made my life here, first in Glasgow and now in Edinburgh. Scotland is where I graduated, got my first job, bought my first flat and climbed my first hill. It’s where I first fell in love, with an Englishman, and then, five years later, fell in love again – with a Scottish woman. It’s where we registered our civil partnership in a 1930s registrar’s office, one of those austere post-classical buildings that are sober and at the same time deeply romantic. And it’s where we registered the birth of our baby last year: a mixed-race boy with two mothers and Scottish, English and Indian heritage – just one of Scotland’s children for whom we are being told to cast our votes on Thursday. Actually I have already voted – appropriately, by post from England. Which way did I go? In the end, after months of agonising, I voted yes. Yes, because I think there is the potential for more social justice and equality in an independent Scotland. Yes, because Scotland is already on the road to independence. And yes, because what was holding me back, in the end, was the English person in me that simply didn’t want Scotland to go. I still feel uneasy about my decision but that would have been the case whichever way I went. My Scottish partner, meanwhile, voted no. Probably the opposite of what you would expect and certainly the first time we’ve disagreed over a political issue, but then again nothing in this debate has been as polarised as it seems. And now I find myself in a curious position in the week of the independence referendum of having spent exactly half my life in England and half in Scotland. As the polls continue to show a country divided in two, my life is conveniently splitting down the middle – a personal border between my childhood down south and my adulthood up north. If I were a place, I would be Berwick-upon-Tweed. If I were a cake, I would be something contested, like a scone. Over recent months it all went a bit Jekyll and Hyde as my English self opined: “Please, Scotland, don’t go! I’ll stop mispronouncing Milngavie! I’ll give up my secret belief that English pubs are better!” and my Scotland-residing self retorted: “Don’t listen! She thought Carlisle was in Scotland! Run and don’t look back! This way lies self-governance and no Tories!” The paradox of identity is that you have to leave a country to really belong to it, which is why you won’t find a more sentimental bunch this week than the Scottish diaspora. Scotland changed me as soon as I pulled into Central station and, for the first time in my life, became English. Before, like many second-generation immigrants who were born in England in the 70s and 80s, I considered myself British. The United Kingdom was the country to which my parents came. “British Asian” was the box I ticked on paper and inside my head. When I visited relatives in India, I was the Britisher who couldn’t pronounce her own name. But English? Never, and especially not around the English. No, it was Scotland that suddenly made me feel English, a sensation as strange and surprising as dancing like Kate Bush while everyone else is doing a Gay Gordons. When I left Glasgow for Edinburgh a decade later, I felt fiercely Glaswegian. These days I’m a proud Leither, the republic that, as any Edinburgher knows has, had once long enjoyed its own independence. Having a child in my adopted country has tethered me to Scotland all over again. My son, born in Edinburgh’s Royal Infirmary, is Scottish, English, Indian and British, a rich and sometimes overpowering brew of an identity that so far no box has been big enough to contain. He will continue to be all these things in a post-indyref world but in what order and to what extent, I have no idea. All I do know is that whichever way Scotland goes on Thursday, his, my and all of our senses of self will keep shifting because that’s what identities, at their most marvellous, mysterious and borderless, do. And whether or not I am setting foot in an independent Scotland, I shall continue to feel as if I have come home whenever I go to Glasgow. |