The liver took the longest to burn. That’s where the disease had likely lodged itself, the maid’s six-year-old grandson explained. I was carrying my father’s remains. The boy walked beside me, already a veteran of the funeral pyre.

Only hours earlier, he had ridden his rickety bicycle to the front door of my ancestral house, which was an act forbidden in normal times. Sweat dripped from his palms; his face and ears looked hot. It was not yet time to return, he said, his voice almost out of range. The boy lived on the outskirts of the village near the cremation ground. He seemed to know something I didn’t: the body can burn for a long time.

Dressed in white, men and women from low castes arrived and congregated in our courtyard. We drank tea from the same cups. They had promised not to wail, giving the occasion a western sensibility. So we waited, mostly in silence, except occasionally a relative would walk over with specific advice. An aunt handed me a white cotton bag. “Ash can be heavy,” she said. “Hold it from the bottom like a full grocery bag.”

This was Punjab in 2013, where in villages such as Khanpur, a seven-hour drive from Delhi, a variation of feudalism has remained intact. The villagers considered the entire place my family’s jagir, a land reward we had received from Maharaja Ranjit Singh in the early 1800s, placing us at the top of the hierarchy. Farmers and workers called my father Sardar, their lord. For three generations, the men in my family had lived primarily in the west, but had returned to Khanpur toward the ends of their lives.

“Take me back to India,” my father had said to me on a rainy London evening as we drove home after his last hospital appointment, bumping along Fulham Road, whose bends had become familiar. Deciding where to die was a test of his immigrant loyalties, and he chose India. He was unfazed by the fact that essentials such as oxygen tanks and nurses were unavailable in rural parts of the country. Morphine shortages risked turning a cancer death into a brutal ordeal.

So from spring to summer, I relocated to Khanpur. I resented the disruption this posed to my career and personal life. I worried mostly about what my father’s sickness might reveal about me.

As I waited for the pyre to cool down, I escaped to the rooftop, from which, as children, my sister and I used to peek into other people’s homes. A tight world of rooftops, some lit, some eclipsed by shadows. You could still hop, climb one wall and jump off another. We sensed the asymmetry then, in the height and sizes of homes, between our world and our neighbours’.

Around midday, the boy returned with an update: the earth was cool enough to collect the remains. I grabbed the empty white bag and walked out the front door. The women stayed behind and the men followed me.

I walked down an uneven path that cut through the village square. I reached the village periphery, turned on to an unpaved path and walked past a school largely built by my family. I could see the dusty imprints of children’s feet.

When I arrived at the cremation ground, a dry patch of land surrounded by verdant fields, the maid’s grandson was sitting on a low-hanging branch. He had remained there until dawn, watching my father’s body burn slowly and keeping the vultures away. Now he watched me as I took a stick and sieved through the ash, discovering a layer of pale gray powder first, and then some of my father’s nails.

The scent of sandalwood and ghee rose from the ground. Tractors roared in nearby fields. I was glad for the noise. Relatives and village elders stood around, awkwardly waiting for me to invite them to pick the remains, to turn this into a communal act. “Come,” I said, and they all stepped forward.

I went off toward the lower body, squatted and dug my hands into the pile of residue. The ash was paste-like, thick and soft, altered by the gallons of butter we had poured on the pyre. Even in the gentle breeze, it adhered to the ground.

At the right arm I found my father’s silver bangle, the one he had worn most of his life. “Mr Singh, could you please remove that,” the nurses would say to him back in London during each treatment.

It was a short walk back. Family and villagers had gathered in the village square. My aunt explained that the house was empty so I could complete the last ritual. I would take my father’s remains back to the house, walk through every single room, and ask him to come with me. “Speak to him loudly and tell him it’s time to leave the house,” she said.

I entered the house with one hand on top of the bag and one on the bottom so the sediments wouldn’t blow in the wind. Three crows sat on the outer wall. It was quiet.

Standing alone in the courtyard, as I was about to whisper the words, I stumbled. This place, seemingly at the edge of the world, had been an important nexus between India and the west for my family for more than a century; first, for my great-grandfather, who emigrated to the US in the early 1900s; then for my grandfather, who left for England; and finally, for my father. I was up against the multiple legacies of my ancestors, who had gone abroad and returned to die here. This property, where I now stood, had been their cure to what Edward Said called “the crippling sorrow of estrangement”.

I reminded myself of my other life. I wasn’t a sardar, and the US was my home. I was in a same-sex relationship, and the fact that my partner was a Muslim American whose parents were born in Pakistan meant the Indian authorities would not readily give him a visa. In fact, he wasn’t at my side now for this very reason.

I began to close the bedroom doors, the wooden doors with rusted nails, unsure as to how and when I would ever return.

Our house in Khanpur was built in two phases. The older part, a red brick tower with arched windows and stained glass built in the early 1920s, was designed with specific purposes: to showcase the family wealth, to place the men of the house so high that others would need to look up, and to encase the women of the house so they could gaze out but not be seen.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Family patriarch Puran Singh, in artwork by Jules Arthur. Photograph: Jules Arthur

Growing up, I heard stories about its construction: how the brick had come from Multan, the peacock murals from Amritsar, and the stained glass from Delhi. Most importantly, the money was sent from some rural farm in Yuba City, California, where my great-grandfather, Puran Singh, worked as a peach farmer. He was among the first south Asians to set foot on American soil in the early 1900s.

As our house was constructed, people travelled on foot from nearby towns and villages to marvel not only at the building but at the abundance and opportunities a brush with the US could bring. For a long time, our house was known as Amerika-wallan da Kar, the house of the Americans.

The second part of the house was built in the late 1950s with my grandfather Bawa Singh’s earnings from his work at a Dunlop factory in Coventry, in the British West Midlands. Just as the dollar-funded tower was tall, the sterling-funded house was sprawling, as if my grandfather were saying to his father: You built high, now I will build long. Soon our house became England-wallan da Kar, the house of the English.

I was six years old when I first came to Khanpur, in 1984. Faced with old age and early dementia, Bawa Singh had asked my father to take him back to India. He obliged, and since my mother didn’t want to leave us behind, the entire family relocated from Coventry.

I remember walking into the courtyard and meeting a woman who was sitting cross-legged, cleaning her glasses with the ends of her dupatta. She was my step-grandmother, and this was the first I learned of her existence. A short, fierce woman, she married into the family in the 1930s. She bore no children, and was left behind after the rest of the family emigrated to England. So when we showed up on that hot summer’s day, exhausted by the travel, it was no surprise that she didn’t get up to offer us even a glass of water.

We called her Mataji, meaning “respected mother”. That was how she had been known to the village for so long that even my parents couldn’t remember her actual name. She didn’t like the adults we came with, but she took to my sister and me. During our seven-year stay in India, we attended a boarding school several hours away from Khanpur. When we returned for summer holidays, Mataji would stand at the doorstep of the house, ready to pour a few drops of mustard oil by our feet to ward off evil spirits, welcoming us as if we had returned from a long exile.

This role, of waiting and welcoming, was familiar to her. The story of this house and of Punjab, she would say, is not about the men who left but the women who stayed behind.

Through those long years as the sole occupant of the house, night after night, she was the one who lit the oil lamps and left them by the door. She would climb the tower every day and gaze out of the stained-glass windows, updating her mental map of the village. She built a wide network of patronage, slotting each person into their deserved role.

As a child, I had this sense that the world was fractured. Every day, people showed up at our front door with their troubles. This desperation, which unfolded on our doorstep, was often met with benevolence, but was never to be mistaken for intimacy or trust. We were not them, and they could never be us. I could play with the children of the village, but I was prohibited from eating with them, from drinking milk from their cows, from ever talking about my family. And they were never allowed into our courtyard and bedrooms. “Some people have you in their prayers, most have you in their curses,” Mataji would remind me every time I struck up a friendship with a kid from the village.

My father was 16 when he got on a plane to England, in 1962, but no one came to receive him on the other side. He searched the airport for hours, looking for an uncle who should have been waiting at the terminal. Two pounds was all he had in his pocket – a customary amount that newcomers from the subcontinent carried. He also had the address of a distant relative who lived in London.

He followed the crowd out into the damp night and stood outside long enough to realise the black cars that came and went were taxis. He got into one and arrived at the only address he knew. When the door swung open, a Jamaican man asked my father his name, and informed him that the relative was at work and would return in the morning. My father waited. The next day, he sent a telegram to his parents, asking them to come and get him. An uncle eventually showed up. In a borrowed Morris 1100, my father arrived a week later in Coventry, the town that supplied Jaguars to the world.

I’ve often wondered if that was the moment when his relationship with this adopted country soured. Dislocation of time, of place and language, experienced so acutely on arrival. To have waited and watched the quiet agony in the faces of arriving immigrants gaining a foothold in a strange land. To have told himself he was different: that it was ambition, and not desperation, that had compelled him to get on that plane. After all, although he was a worker here, he was the son of a lord back home.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Jaguar factory in Coventry, 1962. Photograph: Terry Fincher/Mirrorpix

England was not a place with which one fell in love instantly. Coventry, one of the English cities most bombed in the second world war, was still recovering. The terraced house on Coronation Road, where my father lived with his parents and two brothers, along with a roster of newly arrived immigrants, was shockingly underdeveloped. There was no central heating in the house; a fireplace in the living room was the only source of heat. My father quickly realised that outer appearances mattered in achieving assimilation, so he cut his hair and dispensed with his turban.

One day, at the age of 21, he came home to learn that his marriage had been arranged. My mother would soon arrive from India. She was light-skinned and from an equal family. They had not met before. It was to be a marriage among migrants, a bet on two outsiders finding their own solace.

Success meant full adaptation at every important milestone. Unable to find a venue willing to host his religious wedding ceremony, he picked a pub instead, clearing the smell of booze with incense and convincing a priest to bring the holy book to a bar.

With the rise and fall of the British car industry – the golden age of the 60s, the slump of the late 70s – career trajectories changed. There were promotions in our family. My father became a foreman, another uncle a supervisor, and there was movement within divisions from the assembly line to managerial work.

However, in these turbulent political times, my father’s interior life was largely inaccessible to the rest of us. My family emulated the three-tiered structure of British life: the home, the factory and the pub. These domains rarely overlapped – except on a warm July day in 1981, when Charles and Diana got married. My father had the day off, and aunts and uncles came to our house to watch the wedding, wearing their finest clothes, as if they were invited. It was a rare day when we seemed to belong to the same reality as our English neighbours.

As the family became confidently middle class, my father’s turban reappeared. By the early 90s, he and his brother ran a grocery store. Because this was a family business, it became a family space, and I got to see my father interact with the rest of British society. It was mandatory for the children to spend a few hours in the store after school, stacking shelves, counting produce and ordering inventory.

It all seemed to be going well until one day, at the age of 13, I happened to be alone with my father at the store when a teenager kicked the door open. His name was Danny. He was a council estate kid who wore a gold chain around his neck. He scouted the lanes, picking up a few items here and there as my father tried to keep an eye on him; he had stolen before.

Danny placed two packets of Opal Fruits on the counter and waited for my father to ring him up. “Take out the chocolates from your jacket pocket,” I remember my father saying, his voice calm but firm. “Fuck off, Paki,” Danny said before he ran out.

The two of them brawled outside the shop. My father’s turban unravelled. I watched him fall to the ground and wished he would pick himself up, fast, before someone from my school saw him. Danny bolted in the direction of the estates. My father returned to the shop with a Cadbury’s bar in his hand, reclaimed from Danny. The chocolate had broken in two; it was damaged goods. He ate one piece and then he went to the back of the shop to fix his turban. Soon the front door opened and we moved on to serving the next customer. We never once talked about the incident.

We never spoke about race because we believed that class could erase our exclusion. We couldn’t change the colour of our skin, so we worked harder to become more prosperous.

Strategies for class mobility were my father’s area of expertise. He turned up for every national and local election. He signed my sister and me up for the Labour party, asking us to pay our dues because a day would come when we would need representation. He lauded the British for their industriousness, marvelled at how small they were in size as a country and how large an empire they had ruled. Nevertheless, every time a newly elected British prime minister visited India, he would register his usual lament: “Will they ever apologise for their colonial crimes?” English pride and Indian nationalism went hand in hand: although he was a “midnight’s child”, born in 1947 in a free India, the British loomed large in his psyche. They were the masters, and they had taught him that power itself was a value, worthy of respect, even if it was grudging.

Surely this was ordinary interplay between real and imaginary homes, the kinds of conversations that took place in every immigrant household. Nearly all my uncles at some point considered returning to India, but none had followed through.

I had expected my father to be similarly pragmatic. I didn’t realise his attachment to his original home was so deep that one day he would be willing to accept a more painful death over remaining in England.

Fifty years after his first arrival, three months before he died, he was back at Heathrow airport, bidding farewell to England.

Coming out to my parents in Punjabi had proved nearly impossible. The words for it didn’t exist in the language. Resorting to English would make my sexuality feel like a western construct. When parts of myself were translated into different tongues, a wedge seemed to be driven through me.

But duality was not unfamiliar to my father. It had seeped into his parenting. He would moralise in Punjabi and transact in English. He didn’t care how I chose to live my life in the west. He was mostly concerned about India, that nothing would come in the way of its enduring pull. It was only after his stage-four cancer diagnosis that something changed: each time I left the UK or spoke to him on the phone, my father would say in English and in Punjabi, “Be happy,” and, “Don’t worry.”

Acceptance was not immediate. For a short while my father thought my partner, Muneer, a law professor, had all the markings of a Muslim terrorist. An avid newspaper reader, he started saving specific types of articles. One such clipping traced the journey of a UK-born, Ivy League-educated Muslim man involved in a terrorist plot.

I told my father I was sure of one thing: Muneer was not into blowing himself up. A few months later he mentioned another story he had read, about a same-sex couple becoming parents. “You should have a child,” he said to me one day, as I accompanied him to his chemotherapy treatment. “In fact, have twins, since you are starting so late.”

In 2012 my father asked me to visit India and to bring Muneer with me. I resisted; London would be easier, given India’s restrictive visa policy for anyone with ancestral ties to Pakistan. He pushed, and we relented, aware that we were being asked to demonstrate how this relationship would not hinder my heritage.

We waited for several months, but the visa never arrived. I called my father to give him the bad news. “With your education, I’m confident the two of you can find a way,” he said, taunting us.

We arrived late on a warm, humid afternoon, and my parents were standing at the door. I watched nervously as they hugged Muneer. My father’s face lit up as he heard Muneer speak in Hindustani. They hugged again.

The next morning, over breakfast, my father pointed in the direction of the Wagah border, about 100km from the village. In good times, one can take a taxi from Amritsar to Lahore. He asked Muneer if he would be willing to meet a few people, to talk about his work and share his impressions of Punjab. So far our visit had been an intensely private affair and I wanted to keep it that way.

But here was my father, living his true life, and it proved hard not to respond to that. Over the years, he had become an important powerbroker, collaborating with local politicians and businesses to mobilise investments from the Punjabi diaspora.

We found ourselves walking into a cantonment in Nawanshahr, dotted with offices once occupied by the British army and civil services. Unbeknown to Muneer and me, in one of the offices, 10 journalists and three TV crews were waiting. At the front of the room, a long table was arranged with four chairs.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Navtej Singh Dhillon’s family home in Khanpur, Punjab.

We watched more press pour into the room. My father tapped the table. The room fell silent. He turned to his right and introduced Muneer – professor of law, expert in immigration and first-time visitor to Punjab – kicking off the press conference. The local press rarely had a chance to interview someone with roots in Pakistan. They dwelled on what it felt like to be a visitor in Punjab, and how different or similar it was to Pakistan. I watched Muneer shuffle in his chair, clear his throat and answer in Hindi, bending the language, reverting to English and occasionally turning to me for help finishing his sentences. He’s an American, I wanted to say. But that would have been lost on the press. To them he was a Pakistani, both foreign and familiar.

“These kids need to see peace in their lives,” my father interjected. The message seemed intended for the local policymakers.

The day we left, he handed us a binder full of clippings from the local newspapers. “You are always welcome here,” he said to Muneer.

A week before his death, in his hazy state, my father told me about a box in his closet he wanted me to have. I took it as an invitation and walked straight to his bedroom. I found an old cardboard box on the bottom shelf, covered in a layer of dust.

“Dad, these are old registries,” I said. Engraved on the first page was the face of King George VI, the pink lips and bright eyes of the last emperor of India. Below, in thick black ink, Urdu script ran in long symmetrical lines, documenting debts owed to the family and proof of land ownership.

Underneath the registries, I discovered a letter in Urdu. “America 1933,” it said on the top left corner. I asked Nina, a family maid from Bihar, to go around the village and find me an Urdu reader. But such was the legacy of partition: there was no one left in our Punjabi village who spoke the language of my great-grandfather.

From the rooftop, I could see the fertile fields and the dark soil, the kind of topography my great-grandfather Puran Singh would have encountered in the Sacramento Valley. Farming methods developed in the fields of Punjab were in demand in California’s newly arable land. These immigrants could harvest in the scorching heat. They also knew fruit-picking needed delicate hands. It was easy to bruise a peach.

The money they saved arrived back in India through the imperial postal system. Letters carried promises of families reuniting and making the US their home. But the California Alien Land Law of 1913 prohibited immigrants from buying land. A 1920 report from the California State Board of Control described Indian workers as unfit for association with American people. Three years later, the supreme court ruled that Indian men were ineligible for naturalised citizenship.

In 1946, Congress passed legislation that made the first wave of Indian immigrants eligible for US citizenship. Had he been alive, Puran Singh would have shared in the triumph, but also grieved its terms. The India League of America had argued that Indians belonged in the US because they “are anthropologically of Caucasian race”.

Erasing a part of yourself would be the only kind of progress available time and time again.

In our house in the US, we talk about the house in India. I tell my four-year-old son about the peacocks that visit our rooftop in Khanpur, and how one day we will make oil lamps and leave them by the wooden door. Hundreds of people will visit him and they will send him any animal he wants. It’s that kind of place: beautiful, but deeply unequal.

“Who lives there?” my son asks. I’m thrown off by the question, unsure how to explain the hold of an uninhabited place.

In the middle of my night, text messages arrive from people in the village. The banisters have cracked. The village temple needs a generous donation. Nina’s back is crooked and she might return to Bihar.

My mother tells me there is a special kind of blessing my son can only receive if he visits the land of his ancestors.

Searching for an Alzheimer’s cure while my father slips away Read more

We make plans to visit as a family but we falter. Muneer would have to submit his passport for an unknown period and wait for the Indian authorities to respond. Also buried in my resistance is not wanting to submit a visa application for my son. The application will ask if one of his parents or grandparents was born in Pakistan, perhaps prompting the Indian authorities to treat him as a Pakistani American, marking him for ever and limiting his access to India. Or perhaps realising that he has two fathers, they will be inclined to recognise only me, his Indian American father. Our visit is either a process of denying who we are, or comes at the risk of banishment.

My mother often says I’ve changed the course of my son’s life by hyphenating his last name, by adding Ahmad, a Muslim surname, to Dhillon, a Sikh surname. The first time she saw my son’s passport she didn’t speak to me for days. “They won’t like it in India, they won’t like it in America,” she said.

‘I always want you to be well,” Puran Singh wrote in a letter to his son, penned from a rural farm near Yuba City in June 1933. “This is to say I wrote you three letters. Did you get them? If you did why have you not replied?

“You may have heard, I hurt my leg so I am walking with a stick. I think in five to six months I will return home. These days work is very slow. It’s only hand to mouth.

“How are the people in the village? Send me an update on them. I want to know if everyone is healthy.

“If Sham Singh had not tried to come to America it would have been better. One he suffered losses and second my 2,000 rupees got lost in the process. I had to come and go quite a few times which was expensive and he hasn’t got anything from it.

“Answer me soon. I am reminding you. Answer me quickly. Write back.

“Where did you do your second marriage?

“Your well wisher, Puran Singh from America.”

I had carried the letter back to the US. Two years passed before I had it translated.

A version of this piece appears in the fall issue of n+1

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