My conception of ancestry was inexorably changed during several trips to India. Suddenly, opaque memories metamorphosed into realities on a palette of new sounds, words, faces, roads, and structures. Disembarking from the Air India aircraft into the terminal at Mumbai International Airport, I was confronted by a heat whose quality I had never experienced – with smells so foreign my nose wrinkled reflexively, and remained this way for at least a week. A 50-mile trip through the Ghats became a six hour exercise in concentrating on my feet, trying not to contemplate the result of careening over precipitous drops uninhibited by anything as practical as a guardrail.
Passing rusty lorries on the side of the road decomposing under the weight of abandonment, we finally emerged from the clouds into urban Pune, once a mountain station for the British, now a major Indian metropolis. It was here that my ancestral ignorance ended, that my slumbering ethnicity was awakened. I was made rapidly aware of the fact that a significant part of my being existed outside the dominion of cul-de-sacs and traveling soccer games. I can’t say I was disappointed.
One trip to India culminated in a visit to my family’s ancestral home in Ratnagiri, a town on the Maharashtran coast. Our ancestral home is nearly undistinguishable from the tall coconut, mango and a banana trees whose leaves form a lush canopy over its roof. It hardly resembles a residence, but rather, an organic entity, growing new rooms and wings at the arrival of distant cousins who have come to stay and work at the plantation. Viewed from above, I can only imagine the house looking like some multi-tentacled mollusk, spreading itself haphazardly over the jungle floor. Inside the house, the pungent smells of cooking spices permeate the air, and the essences of a thousand meals have indelibly saturated the exposed wooden beams, walls and floorboards. Rooms are decorated with photographs, and hallways that should lead to a room or stairwell end abruptly in shadowy vestibules. Its façade will never grace the glossy pages of Architectural Digest and by all accounts its a strange place, but to us, it’s home.
Upon arriving at the house, we are greeted by our family matriarch, Kaku. She is 95 years old, my greatgreat aunt several times removed and something of a local legend. At 70, her health was failing and she was crippled by arthritis. Lying down to die in a room in the house, Kaku refused to submit, entering a deep coma to avoid death. In the early morning, several months later, my second cousin woke to hear someone moving in the kitchen. Upon investigation, he discovered that it was Kaku making her morning tea as though she had never left. Family members descended on the kitchen, dumbstruck at her vitality. When asked whether she realized she had been dying, Kaku responded, “Yes, I went to heaven, but God told me I wasn’t ready, so I came back."
It is a story that has been told a thousand times throughout Ratnagiri, with ever-growing degrees of inaccuracy. This almost made it better – I had suddenly become a part of some familial mythology, a privileged custodian of the original tale. I felt connected to my family’s history, like it had always been just beneath the surface of my every day life, waiting to be discovered.
When I returned to the U.S., I asked my mom if she knew about Kaku. “Of course, everyone knows about her,” she replied. Sensing the opportunity, I asked her about the house in Ratnagiri and Pune and her grade school; the coconut vendors on the street yelling “Narul!” and whether yogurt had always been sold wrapped in newspaper. She raised a curious eyebrow and a silence set in before I was immersed in her life prior to emigrating to the U.S. We talked for hours – I had found my ancestry. 
This article is as a companion to Scott Vignos’ audio piece, “Digging for My Roots in Ratnagiri,” available exclusively at www.thelensmagazine.com. Scott Vignos is a senior sociology and anthropology major from Anchorage, Alaska.