Just One Thing with Ajay Makan

“I grabbed this photo last spring at a beach outside Lisbon where I sometimes swim. There are South Asian immigrants all over Portugal but you rarely see them relaxing at the ocean, so I loved the intensity with which they were playing kabaddi in the evening sun.”

Ajay Makan’s essay “Two Immigrants” is a thoughtful, image-rich meditation in parts, each section holding up an experience through which to consider immigration and identity. Here he shares just one thing about the piece:

“I started working on the piece that became “Two Immigrants” four years ago when I returned from a solo cycling trip. 

The encounter I describe at the start of the piece left me shaken for days as apparently innocuous encounters with first generation South Asian immigrants often do. By writing about it I wanted to excise the power of those moments and articulate, to myself first, the web of feelings that sweep through me in these interactions. 

What came out was thousands of words about my father, and the often completely imaginary traces I see of him in strangers. After several rejections of that piece, I was lucky to have a writer friend explain to me simply: the writing is good, but it has to speak to something beyond you. I cut the text and focused more on the place where I was writing from - Portugal and its different kinds of immigrants.

I’d still love to say something more about my father one day, but for now I’m glad simply to have started to write, and to understand, a little better, the emotions that often overwhelm me..”