(Un)Settled: Notes from a Shifting Life

In 2004, Kamini Karlekar went to Sudan as one civil war came to an end and another was about to start, to work in the field of refugee protection. Her experiences there and later in another war-torn country, Liberia, gave her an unforgettable and poignant sense of what it means to be uprooted, rendered homeless, to grow up in camps, to always be an outsider. As she turned thirty, she faced a personal sense of rootlessness; in Indian terms, she was 'unsettled' in every way that mattered. As a young Indian woman, she travelled between the world of Africans and the worlds of Europeans and Americans - she had a passport to all, but she belonged to none. She came of age in Sudan and Liberia, falling in love, fighting for what mattered to her, struggling to find a place for herself in the world. In this extraordinary and moving personal memoir, the first of its kind by an Indian, Kamini Karlekar explores what it means to be unsettled - and to belong.