In the early 1980s, after I had become an Australian citizen, I experienced an interesting encounter with an elderly lady whose grandfather had a stint in India as a British army officer.

She asked me if I was Indian.

‘No’, I replied, ‘although India is my ancestral home. My grandparents and parents were born there, and I spent most of my school holidays in Calcutta.’

‘Pakistani?’

‘No. Well, I was born in Pakistan but my Australian passport doesn’t say so.’

‘Ah, an Australian!’ The enlightened exclamation sounded very definitive in its conclusion. ‘So you were born in Pakistan but now you are an Australian citizen. You are a Pakistani born Australian.’

I wasn’t prepared to let it rest at that. ‘Not quite,’ I teased. ‘I was born in Pakistan, but officially I can no longer claim that privilege.’

Perplexing silence.

I felt rather pleased with the web of mystery I had so effortlessly spun around my national identity. The riddle was rapidly reaching the complexity worthy of the Sphinx.

It was time for the grand revelation. ‘I was born in East Pakistan,’ I explained. ‘It is now Bangladesh.’

Her positive smile didn’t hide the confusion, but it was the truth. It really summed me up.

I was born in Pakistan, spent stretches of time in India, had a rebirth in Bangladesh without ever believing in reincarnation, and here I am, an Australian in possession of a certificate and an associated document of sixty-four pages valid for ten years to prove I have a homeland.

Hamlet’s dilemma was relatively simple. He was merely crawling between earth and heaven – an uncharted distance, I’ll grant him that. But, I ask you, what should such fellows as I do with the claims of four different countries tugging at me for some declaration of identity and loyalty?

As I pass through a phase during which ‘looking back’ is a psychological and emotional imperative, ‘homeland’ is really a distant landscape shrouded in the fog of a lost time. My recollections of the past, at best, are imperfect. The colours have faded and the pictures are torn with fragments missing. The fallibility of memory has precipitated an overwhelming sense of loss, and it is this painful awareness of deprivation which ultimately drove me toward the creation of a fictitious homeland, one that was consistent with whatever I remembered, one where I felt at home.

Whatever the compulsion is for writers in my position, whether they be emigrants or expatriates, there is, broadly speaking, a commonality of purpose in creating a ‘homeland’. It fills those gigantic gaps in the past and makes the present more bearable because it diminishes that sense of loss. But that creation is essentially an illusion, and deep inside one knows that the purpose will not be fulfilled because illusions are transient. To try and reclaim a lost land from the past leads to disconcerting discoveries about the mutation in one’s personality and the resultant changes in perspectives.

My last visit to Bangladesh was like entering a chamber of mirrors which reflected me from different angles. The images were unflattering and, at times, distressing. I was no more than the Biblical stranger in a strange land. My mistake was a common one. I had deceived myself into believing that I was going back to the same country as the same person who had left all those years ago. I was left with the stark realisation that the strong sense of alienation from my native land meant that it was impossible to retrieve what had been irrevocably lost. But I simply couldn’t allow a part of me to drift into oblivion. The best way to keep the past and give it a measure of credibility was to attempt the creation of cities, villages, people, and events, imitations of the ones I had known. This was a compromise I reached after a reluctant understanding that time is a one-way street. No U-turns are possible.

‘The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.’ The famous opening sentence of L.P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between highlighted precisely the dilemma I faced. No matter how much I endeavoured to transcend the barriers of time and reach the landscape floating hazily in the spaces of memory, there was an unbridgeable distance to my immutable homeland. There were times when I felt that I was close, but whenever that optimism arose, the landscape receded and I never quite made it. I suppose it was my sheer stubbornness and my unwillingness to accept a crippling loss which made me strive for the impossible.

I didn’t begin writing immediately in response to the disconcerting revelation that Bangladesh could no longer be called ‘home’. Seven years later, I still hadn’t fully accepted the implications of my discovery.

Beginning my first novel in the wintry bleakness of a Sunday afternoon in Ballarat, I spurned the notion of an imaginative truth for the inflexible reality of a past untouched by the deceptiveness of memory. What I didn’t wish to understand at the time was that this ‘reality of the past’ was a Utopian ideal created by a migrant’s nostalgia for a homeland immune to the forces of social and political changes. The tenacious retention of an imprint of an original homeland, suspended in time, was a subconscious apology for the betrayal implicit in the act of leaving one’s native country.

It took more time and many discarded words to overcome the depressing frustration of coming to terms with the knowledge that the past was a lost continent resting quietly under a sea to time – unforgettable but, as the same time, not reachable. At best I could coax memory to throw up fragments which could never complete the entire picture. The missing pieces would have to be invented and extensive renovations undertaken. For this new homeland to have any credibility, it was necessary for memory and imagination to co-exist in a harmonious relationship.

I stepped into another world with a misplaced confidence that I had finally sorted it all out. I had memory, some imagination and language as my tools, everything I needed to build a literary edifice. Of course, it wasn’t quite that easy. Memory was often uncooperative, the imagination a temperamental flirt and the words … well, they belonged to a language which was not indigenous to the subcontinent.

With the benefit of hindsight, I can now say that it took a very long time for memory and imagination to reach an agreement over the nature of reality. Since I hadn’t visited the subcontinent for a number of years, I could not possibly have a credible grasp of the reality of life there. So I set about to create a parallel homeland, one that was consistent with the perspective of a displaced character focusing on the country of his birth with a cracked lens. And how legitimate is that? For me the answer is now a straightforward one. It is perfectly justifiable to create a homeland in one’s own fashion as long as the writer is honest about the intention behind the creation. Literature does not have to be authenticated with empirical certainties. The measure of its worth is to be judged by the quality of thoughts and emotions breathed into it.

From a subcontinental perspective, the fact remains that in the post-diaspora communities, we are not Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, or Buddhists in a rigid, conventional sense, regardless of how much we may attempt to cling to the singularity of a specific identity or tradition. The persistent tensions which result from the tug of polarised cultures make a nonsense of such efforts. Cultural pluralism is simultaneously a heavy burden and a wealth which most of us have inadvertently discovered. But it does not offer much territorial stability. In a sense, it is a no­-man’s-land. Here the earth often shakes quite violently to discourage us from developing another notion of a permanent homeland and belonging. However uncomfortable this position may be, it is by no means an arid ground for the mind which continues to search relentlessly for a long term security it has known before. That search is often converted into an act of creation.

So, for me, the writing homeland is a very real one. It is an amalgamation of remembrances, half-truths, fragmented images, gaunt shadows, snatches of conversations, and yearnings structured into a shimmering mirage by an imagination that feeds itself uneasily on an awareness of the discrepancy between the way it was and the way it possibly is. My fictitious homeland is my way of protecting the past from the corrosive influence of time and granting myself the partial security of an age from which we must all eventually depart.