Anil – traveller or migrant?
It is a worthwhile approach to see if Anil can be fitted into familiar categories of identity. The forms of identity that are appropriate in this case are those of a ‘traveller‘ and of a ‘migrant‘, because both ideas describe a specific way of ‘moving around’, something that Anil does frequently. The biggest difference between the two concepts is that a traveller intends to leave again from the place he goes to, either in order to return to his origin or to continue the journey to another place. A migrant, however, plans to leave his origin for good and wants to establish a new home at his destination. That might, of course, not always work out for the migrant and he quite often does return, but this return is then usually the result of resignation and failure.
Anil has features of both a traveller and a migrant. Not only does her job already involve a fair amount of travelling, she also moves around a lot after she has left Sri Lanka. But these moves are rather to be called migrations since they are more permanent and because she does not return to her origin. Another argument which supports Anil’s role as a migrant is the fact that Anil usually crosses borders when she moves to the next place. A border crossing is an essential part of a migration. Someone who moves from one city to another within the same country can hardly be called a migrant, but as soon as he enters another country we are likely to call him that.
What puts Anil into the role of a traveller is the fact that all her moves happen for her own benefit. A migrant often does not know if life at his destination will improve compared to the life he has led before, and many times it does not. Anil, however, knows beforehand what she can expect at her destination and her prospects are always good, be it for example an education or job opportunity.
At this point, I also want to take a look at Anil’s return to Sri Lanka. She has been away for fifteen years and stopped keeping in touch with her family and her friends. The government official who picks her up at the airport upon her arrival asks her: “‘You have friends here, no?’” to which she replies: “‘Not really.’” (10). He also characterises her return as “The return of the prodigal” (10), referring to the parable of the lost son from the bible. By doing this, he suggests that she tried to leave Sri Lanka behind to live her own life, but failed. Just as the lost son returns because he knows that even as one of his father’s servants he will have a better life, Anil in the role of the prodigal son would admit her own failure in her emigration and would come back to Sri Lanka regretting that she has left. Anil, of course, vigorously rejects this title: “‘I’m not a prodigal.’” (10).
However, a very striking incident, which can be connected to the idea of the lost son, takes place on the first weekend after her return. Anil hires a car and visits her childhood nanny, who lives together with her granddaughter. At the beginning, Anil is puzzled because she does not know the granddaughter, who does not even introduce herself although she speaks English. In a way, this whole encounter can indeed be seen as the return of the prodigal: Lalitha takes the role of the father and the granddaughter takes the role of the reluctant brother. She is jealous of Anil, which manifests itself for example in the fact that she does not facilitate the conversation by translating what Anil and Lalitha want to say to each other.
The reunion is very disappointing for Anil. She emphasizes the important role that Lalitha has had in her life: “‘In a way she was the one who brought me up.’ Anil wanted to say more, to say that Lalitha was the only person who taught her real things as a child”. But Lalitha’s granddaughter interrupts and clarifies aggressively: “‘She brought all of us up,’”. Anil realizes that the ties to her Sri Lankan past and her youth have been cut when she turns around to her childhood nanny and sees that “Lalitha had fallen asleep” (24).
We have seen that Anil can neither entirely be called a traveller nor a migrant, but Heike Härting might have a solution to this problem of definition in form of another concept. She claims that Anil can well be described as a nomad since she possesses “transnational mobility” and a “sense of an absolute cultural and social displacement” (2003, 50). Referring to that notion, Härting concludes:
Indeed, the narrative frequently suggests that Anil’s experience of cultural and social displacement presents a cultural impediment that keeps her suspended in a state of perpetual foreignness and transition rather than allowing her to inhabit multiple cultural and historical spaces at once. (2003, 51)