What growing up Pakistani taught me about India and how those feelings changed in Canada
Somehow my ‘enemy’ was supposed to be the people who made me feel most welcome after immigrating
This is a First Person column by Zahra Khozema, a Pakistani Canadian journalist who lives in Toronto. For more information about CBC's First Person stories, please see the FAQ.
I was nine, standing in the dusty courtyard of my school in Karachi, Pakistan, yelling death to India, along with my other classmates.
"India murdabad, India murdabad." (Death to India, Death to India.)
It was a chant I didn't fully understand, but I did it anyway because it earned nods from teachers and cheers from classmates.
Nationalism like this always would typically peak in Pakistan during cricket matches with our neighbour or when a new Bollywood movie, yet again, portrayed Muslims and Pakistanis as a bloodthirsty villain who want to steal the honour of a Hindi queen or detonate bombs to harm civilian life in India. It also surges in times like now, when political tensions are high and the possibility of another full-out war looms overhead.
A deadly militant attack in Kashmir, in which 24 Hindu tourists, one Christian tourist and a guide were executed, sparked this particular conflict. Pakistan denies India's claims that it was behind the attack, and the militaries of the two countries were engaged in one of their most serious confrontations in decades.
War is always devastating, but what makes hostility in this region worse is that India and Pakistan are both nuclear powers.
Despite a fragile ceasefire, tensions remain high. My phone keeps buzzing. Non-South Asian friends are "checking in" and asking if my family back home is safe as disinformation is propagated and debunked. Some forward memes mocking the situation. The comment sections of these posts reek with racist remarks like "the smelliest war" when anti-South Asian sentiment in Canada is already on the rise. Others want my "thoughts," as if I'm the designated spokesperson for Pakistanis.
What do you say when it feels like so many people are waiting for you to spew hate?
I can't do that.
After my family immigrated from Pakistan to Toronto in 2005, some of the people who made me feel most welcome were Indian. I didn't speak English then, so my teacher paired me with a classmate who could translate — a Kashmiri Indian girl who spoke Punjabi.
I spoke Urdu, not Punjabi, but it was close enough. That girl — my first encounter with someone who I thought was an "enemy" — was 10 and wore pigtails. She sat with me when no one wanted to associate with the new kid who went to English as a second language (ESL) class. We didn't talk much because of the language barrier, but I'll always remember her as my first friend in Canada.
By the time I'd gained the confidence to thank her in English, I had moved schools.
Soon enough, the idea that Indians hated us, or that Hindus hated Muslims, had already started to unravel in the face of lived experience. I spent the rest of my elementary school years dancing to Bollywood bangers at talent shows and trading my samosa lunches for khaman dhoklas with Gujarati friends. The lines that once felt so rigid back home had begun to blur here.
BBC Asia Network's Haroon Rashid said it best: "In the world of the West … we were all one. We were often seen with the same lens, abused by the same words, treated, in some cases, with the same sense of otherness." As South Asian immigrants, we are "united by food and fashion and films and music and culture and language and upbringing," he added.
But I started to see past the propaganda when, at age 16, I became one of the lucky few Pakistanis granted a visa to visit India.
The animosity between the two countries rarely allows for cross-border travel, so on this visit, my mom insisted we go to Siddhpur, a small town in Gujarat. It's where our family lived for generations before Partition in 1947 — the violent and chaotic division of British India into two separate countries that triggered mass migration and ongoing conflict. My grandparents were all born on the "other side" of the border and we still have some distant relatives who live in India.
My mother's eyes lit up as we drove past our once-ancestral home — the one her mom had described in stories — on a street lined with the city's iconic colourful bungalows. It seemed so familiar to her, even though it had been three decades since her last visit. I, however, felt conflicted. It felt disloyal to the country I was born in, and I didn't appreciate that my mom was trying to connect me to the one her mother had left behind.
We also visited the graveyard where my great-grandmother was buried, but we couldn't find her because the tombstones were etched in Gujarati, a script we couldn't read. We were too nervous to ask for help. I was told you don't admit you're Pakistani there – it's just not done. But we still felt strangely at home since we spoke the language and blended in.
That's why I can't give in to this forced binary of choosing sides. I love my country and have opinions. I see the rise of Hindu nationalism in India, the erasure of Islamic heritage and the brutal crackdown on Kashmiris. I see it and I grieve it deeply, just as I grieve the growing religious extremism in Pakistan, the growing censorship and the crackdown on political deviation that mirrors the very forces we claim to oppose. In trying to defeat each other, we've become a bitter symmetry.
And I'm not the only one feeling this way. While political tensions and cricket rivalries often dominate headlines, many Pakistanis do not harbour animosity toward Indians. The hostility seen online is often amplified by echo chambers and doesn't always reflect the nuanced perspectives of everyday people.
Years later, I crossed paths with that same Kashmiri Indian girl from elementary school. We worked together at a fast-food joint in high school and often bumped into each other on our university campus.
A few years ago, she invited me to her wedding. It was my first time witnessing a Hindu ceremony that wasn't on a TV screen. Indian soap operas had made them seem so dramatic with intense camera zoom-ins and excessive crying. But in reality, it was quiet and intimate — just a boy and a girl sitting with a priest, surrounded by loved ones.
That friend and I keep weaving in and out of each other's lives, gently dismantling the narratives we grew up with. And in those ordinary moments of seated silence, post-work vent sessions and shared celebrations, I'm reminded how much more there is that connects us than divides us.
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