Sadiya Ansari spent six years investigating a period in which her paternal grandmother left her seven children in Karachi, Pakistan, to move 1,000 kilometres away to be with a man.
Daadi, as Sadiya called her, returned to the family fifteen years later, living with her family in Markham, Ontario, for the last decade of her life. As a child, Ansari knew nothing about this period in her family’s history until a chatty aunt mentioned it in passing when she was ten years old. A decade after her grandmother died, Sadiya first broached the topic with her family, but it took another decade to delve into the investigation that would turn into her memoir, In Exile: Rupture, Reunion, and My Grandmother’s Secret Life.
