I landed in Almaty knowing nothing about #Kazakhstan.
By the third day something was wrong. I felt at home and I could not explain why. The mountains. The tea. The way strangers fed me before they asked my name.
Then I went looking, and found out my body had known before my head did.
Four hundred years ago there were #Panjabi men living all across this part of the world. Central Asians called them Multanis, after the city most of them came from. The majority were Khatris.
Picture him. Twenty five years old, from Multan or Rawalpindi (Where my family comes from). Months of walking behind him. Sitting in a caravanserai in Bukhara among people who do not speak his language, opening a ledger. He will not see his mother for years. He is carrying other men's money on nothing but his word.
There were thirty five thousand of them. #Bukhara. #Samarkand. #Kabul. #Astrakhan. #Persia. The edge of #Russia. Kings protected them, because the credit they gave held the countryside together and everybody knew it. When they had a dispute, the local judge wrote their names into his register the same way he wrote everyone else's.
Now hold the other half of it.
While those men sat in #Samarkand (Irony has not died on me) with their ledgers open, #Amritsar was already ours. Guru Arjan would compile the Guru Granth Sahib within a generation, a few hundred miles south, out of the same community those men came from.
Not two worlds. One. One community, one century. Some stayed and built the thing that changed everything. Some went north with a ledger and their word and did not come home for years.
We are told we come from a small place.
We have never been small.
My people walked it for four centuries and kept ledgers.
I came here thinking I was a stranger. I was just late.
There is a book in this.
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