ABSTRACT
The idea of writing Jahajin as a three-stranded story—a young linguist doing recordings of old people; one old woman telling the story of her journey from India and her life in Trinidad; and a folk tale that is also about migration, transformation, and the choices one woman had to make—came out of the blue. There was no pattern that I was taking my cue from. Maybe, far away in India, I was able to feel a similar sense of exile as the old jahajins in Trinidad had felt, being in two minds about which of the two worlds I would have wanted to live my life in. 1
