Pardes Mein
My journey to launching a series that documents the Desi American story
I landed at John F. Kennedy airport in New York on a chilly night in February 2022. This hadn’t been the plan.
I had left the United States in 2019, a year after college, disillusioned with America’s promise. I’d decided to make my life in Pakistan. Then, two years later, fate offered what many Pakistanis like me couldn’t ignore: a second shot at life in the US. For me, this was in New York City.
What should have felt like the fulfillment of a dream became, instead, the beginning of a disorienting journey – one that forced me to reckon with questions of home and identity in ways I’d never anticipated. I felt as if I was on a never-ending quest for belonging in a city that both welcomed and bewildered me. There was no real culture shock; I had already spent more than five years in this country before leaving it in 2019, and many of my closest friends from college were still there. And I also understood very quickly that anyone could be a New Yorker. With all its sounds, colors, and intensity, the city has a way of homogenizing its diversity. It was easy enough to assimilate, and yet that ease was disorienting.
As I moved through the city, I began seeking out little pockets of desi New York. These places of comfort were tucked away, protected from the homogenizing powers of the city: halal carts in Midtown, Punjabi-run delis in the East Village, the hodge podge of little restaurants on Coney Island Avenue, and even the backseats of Ubers and taxicabs which provided endless chit chat with nostalgic desi uncles. In these spaces, comfort arrived to me unexpectedly. And this comfort made it clear that any notion of belonging in this city would have to involve reflections of my past as well.
I joined Urdu poetry groups and film clubs. I went to every South Asian-coded event I could find, hoping to meet other young desis in the city. These gatherings were wonderful and comforting, filled with the familiar music of our mother tongues – Urdu quoted mid-sentence, English bent around desi syntax – and conversations about what it meant to be desi abroad. I could sense how each of us was trying to negotiate our relationship with this country.
And still the central question lingered: did I belong here, or there, or somewhere in the middle?
Throughout my time in New York City, I held onto the idea that I would one day return to Pakistan. I repeated it to myself, to my family, to my friends back home like a mantra meant to convince both the world and myself that my destiny still lay in my hometown in Lahore.
It wasn’t that I couldn’t find my footing in this awe-inspiring melting pot. In fact, quite the opposite. Over time, NYC undoubtedly started to feel like a second home and that was disconcerting – that I felt settled here and could call this place home was confusing. It scared me. Perhaps, the thought that I could have an alternative path, one away from Lahore, even made me feel a little guilty.
I needed to know if others felt this way too.
It seemed to me that the people who had already built a life here would have the answers. So I started asking anyone I could find – desi drivers, restaurant owners, or elderly people I would encounter in daily life. I would slide into an Uber or sit at a restaurant and immediately start: “So how long have you been in New York?”
I quickly realized that as soon as I switched into our shared language – Urdu, Hindi or Punjabi – a kind of intimacy opened between us which allowed for an exchange that was immediately vulnerable, sincere, and unguarded. People spoke to me as one of their own, someone who understood not only their language but also their pain. They shared their stories with me as if unloading a burden they had carried for years. This led me to deep, late-night conversations where I discovered extraordinary stories of migration and survival. Some had come through “dunkee” – border jumping – risking everything for a chance at this life. Others lived with seven or eight roommates, all of whom had made similar journeys, pooling resources for a shot at their dreams in cramped apartments by the airport in Queens. And then there were those who had settled in beautiful old townhouses in Brooklyn. Many had managed to build a life here that they were truly proud of.
I felt as if I was on a never-ending quest for belonging in a city that both welcomed and bewildered me.
The stories revealed a complex image. There was sacrifice and longing for home, the feeling of being stuck, the particular loneliness of an experience that couldn’t be fully shared with those back home for fear of seeming ungrateful. But there were also stories of success – of stability and freedom, of building lives for their children that would have been unimaginable in their home countries. But in all these conversations, I felt the answers I’d been seeking slip further away. The more stories I heard, the harder it was to form any cohesive understanding of what it meant to be South Asian in New York.
Then came Zohran Mamdani. His mayoral campaign brought the desi and Muslim experience into the spotlight in a way that felt newly visible. He spoke openly about the power of community. He celebrated the role that Bangladeshi aunties and Punjabi taxi drivers had played in his movement, a movement rooted in the future of New York. In his inauguration speech, he quoted a Pakistani aunty named Samina: “Logon ke dil badal diye hain.” You’ve changed people’s hearts.
And he had. Throughout his rise, I could feel something transforming in the community. Desi and Muslim immigrants who had mostly been relegated to the shadows in a post-9/11 New York were claiming their political space and getting involved in a movement they believed in. In doing so, they had spoken not just as immigrants but as New Yorkers. We live here, we are invested.
Although the press and local pundits were suddenly taking an interest in this community, they still weren’t really talking to them. They weren’t speaking to the Punjabi Uber driver who had been smuggled from Brazil to the United States on foot. Or the tailor in Little Pakistan who works tirelessly (or barely speaks English) and still found the time to knock on doors for Zohran. Or the fourth-generation baker whose family has been running bakeries in South Asia since the 1800s and who is now continuing that tradition in NYC.
I knew there was so much more to the stories than these headlines could ever capture. I had heard them myself, and I wanted to tell these stories – our stories – because the narratives of desi migrants are woven into the fabric of this city. They are what make New York, New York. We run this city, from taxi drivers to food delivery workers to tech leaders and small business owners. We are not on the margins of this city. We help make it what it is.
They shared their stories with me as if unloading a burden they had carried for years.
What particularly stayed with me from my conversations with desi immigrants all over the city was not just their journeys but the depth of their investment. Their belonging was not abstract. It was earned through sacrifice and commitment. And if belonging was measured not by history but by investment then perhaps the question was no longer whether I belonged here, but whether I was willing to claim that belonging fully.
Listening to these stories, I began to understand that belonging was not something you passively discover. It’s something you actively build. If their investment in the city was measured in risk, labor, and hope, then perhaps mine could begin with attention – with telling their stories.
I launched Pardes Mein (In Foreign Lands) in the hope to create a space for these narratives, one that is full of complexities and contradictions, one that celebrates that experience of being an immigrant in this city fully, and one that doesn’t otherize immigrants but reframes the very identity of this multifaceted, vibrant city itself. To be a New Yorker is to be an immigrant, in one sense of the word or another. And now, in the current political climate, when social media feeds are inundated with rhetoric that vilifies immigrants, and ICE agents wreak havoc on communities from Los Angeles to Minnesota to New York, continuing this work is more important than ever. That’s why I am committed to telling these stories of community and belonging, of an immigrant experience that humanizes the people who call this city home and who, while remembering their roots, have deeply ingrained themselves in NYC today.
the narratives of desi migrants are woven into the fabric of this city.
In my search for answers about where I belong, I think I’m learning a new reality – I don’t need to belong there or here or somewhere in between. I can belong fully to both: I can belong to Pakistan, remain deeply rooted and connected to my community, culture, and language from back home. At the same time, I can belong to New York City. I can invest in my community here, learn from those who came before me, and strive to make this city more equitable, open, and accepting for everyone who calls it home. I wouldn’t be the first person to do it and certainly wouldn’t be the last. To have the capacity for such duality is human. Stripped away from all the political noise around immigration, our own reasoning would actually find this dual existence to be quite intuitive. Of course, we find ourselves drawn to multiple places, people and practices. We find beauty in the smallest of things and experience pain at the prospect of choosing. This nuanced tug and pull is part and parcel of the human condition – so much so that we have even memorialized it in poetry and idioms in every language on earth. You want what you can’t have. The grass is greener on the other side. Kuch paanay ke liye kuch khona parta hai.
In my very first video for Pardes Mein with Ashfaq Uncle, a travel agent in Little Pakistan in Brooklyn, I asked, “Do you think that this is your home now?” He answered, “Ab yehi humara ghar hai. Pakistan mein humara dil hai, humari jaan hai…magar yeh humara mulk hai.” This is our only home now, our hearts are in Pakistan. Pakistan is our soul, but this is our country now.
I am still learning what that means, but home for immigrants, I’m discovering, isn’t a choice between two places. It’s the ability to hold both, to be shaped by multiple worlds. It means carrying Lahore in my heart while building a life in New York City.
Perhaps the question has changed from which place I belong to, to whether I can allow myself to belong fully to both. It’s a question without an easy answer. I think if anything can help it’s the voices of the shopkeepers, Uber drivers, homemakers, and activists – people who have carved out a little piece of this city for us and whose hearts, like mine, also live in two places at once.
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– Waleed Nasir is a freelance journalist and writer based in New York City. Born and raised in Lahore, he has lived in the US, the UK, and Pakistan for the past ten years. He holds an undergraduate degree from Brown University and a master’s degree from the University of Oxford. His work explores international politics, identity, and the South Asian diaspora (preferably over a cup of chai in a far corner of Brooklyn or Queens).
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