My family origins are lost to me, it's all speculation past the Mughals.

We can trace back to the Mughals, as large landowners (we had lands in Meghalaya, present day Bangladesh, Bengal, Delhi and within Pakistan), but originally descended from somewhere further north west.

The Bengali branch was founded only a couple of hundred years ago, when my great, great, great, great ... grandfather and his brothers got tossed out of their then estates in some place in North India, by the British.

Well, the myth is that they refused to give the Raj taxes on their lands, so the Raj chose to brush them off the face of the map. (I like to think my own tax avoidance tendencies come from there. Though on a far smaller scale). They escaped South East and with a fraction of their wealth, they bought a large area of jungle land and then imported Punjabi and Bengali workers to clear it out and build our homes.

I've met some of the descendants of the Bengalis that we brought in, they talk of my people as being "The Tall people", freakishly tall. Which always makes me cry inside (bastard!). In time most of the people also settled in surrounding areas, and we sort of began re-establishing our zamindari ways.

We branched out into academia, got great uncles and great aunts who were Logicians, poets, lawyers and engineers. My maternal grandfather was a waste of time. He was a sufi scholar who spent most of his time abroad. Neglecting my mother's upbringing and in turn giving me a hell of a problem to deal with.

My paternal grandfather was also my maternal grandfather's cousin ... Yeah, we were like that. Anyway, he was reputedly the tallest one in our clan, dwarfing my youngest great-uncle (who is around 6'3"), and the head zamnidar.

Religion didn't factor into things much. Business was a big part of our family, as was in-fighting. Ruthless people, bit like a pool of sharks. And we eat our own.

We're mostly settled in The West now, have been moving here since as early as the 1920s. Uncles and cousins across Europe from Russia to here (UK) and over the pond to the US.

I don't care for religion, I'm more interested in figuring out what to do with what life I have, outside of looking after my mother.

All doors where open to me once, now most of the doors that are left open involve working with family and that's just not acceptable.

I'd like to feel connected to something beyond my family, but the truth is we are pretty much our own people.