In 1990; Butler, Pennsylvania

Time amplifies division; I fear that we’re never going to be a big family again, that my newborn son will never consider his cousins to be siblings like I did.

The email arrived shortly after Christmas 2020. My cousin had digitized the VHS of our family reunion from thirty years ago. At least someone was productive in quarantine.

My wife and I were alone, bored, and nostalgic for past holiday seasons. It was our first Christmas without either of our families. She’d heard stories about this reunion—exemplary of my mom’s youthful dancing days; one of the few video accounts of my grandparents; the famously last time the entire family was together; how no gathering since had replicated its unimpeachable joy. But without a VCR, the footage had been inaccessible until now. We clicked play. The tape was in color but it belonged in black and white.

It’s summer 1990 in Western Pennsylvania, at a Veteran Affairs (VA) campus. Nobody in my family had served in the armed forces. Our freedom was earned upon immigrating from Punjab, India, to no-name towns across North America. North York, Ontario; Longmont, Colorado; Columbus, Indiana; Roanoke, Virginia (perhaps most famous of our newfound hometowns); and Butler, Pennsylvania, the centrally located reunion host city. My uncle, a civil engineer for the VA, is provided housing, with access to the athletic fields, community pool, and tennis courts on campus. It’s an ideal spot to host six large families.

A rented video camera is placed in the corner of the small family room lined with couches facing a bulky television set and stereo system. At first, family members acknowledge the camera with a nervous glance or smile before continuing their conversations. Kids run up to it, screaming or making funny faces, before wandering off. But after a while, the camera disappears, becoming invisible to them. Everyone behaves naturally, forgetting they are under surveillance from the future.

In the video, my grandparents relish the company of their children and grandchildren as they’re chaotically organizing from oldest to youngest on the staircase for a family photo. Grandma is standing on the driveway in her cream-colored salwaar kameez, white chunni, and trademark golden hoop earrings. Her matching loafers are untied. Without hesitation, my dad crouches down. The camera zooms in on his fingers tying her laces. The scene lasts a quiet seven seconds, a brief moment of serenity amid the hours of dancing to celebrate how far they’ve all come from small agricultural villages in Punjab. Dad stands up without acknowledging the camera.

Grandma joins the family in the center of the staircase, surrounding herself with her grandchildren. She wraps her arms around as many of them as she can before the camera clicks. Grandpa stands proudly on the top step, dressed elegantly in a white turban, white shirt, red tie, and gray slacks. His turban is pristine as always and his beard is neatly tied to his cheeks and chin. It’s Saturday morning in the presence of his entire family, yet he’s habitually dressed formally, as if he’s attending a professional conference and not a reunion of loved ones.

His attire clashes with uncles who tuck their T-shirts into pleated shorts and faded jeans, whose striped socks cover most of their shins. The uncles are thinner and have more hair. The aunts abandon work pants and hairnets for colorful embroidered salwaars and kurtas. The adults speak Punjabi. The kids prefer English. It is like an experimental art exhibit—unedited footage of a loving family sharing the joy of proximity in a foreign country, so unlike the eternal scroll of performative videos on my cell phone.

My wife recognized familiar faces from our wedding. “She hasn’t aged at all.” “Those two still giggle like that together.” “We heard these same songs at our reception!” “He still tells the same jokes.” “Those clothes are back in style.”

The party really starts in 1990 when afternoon chai is exchanged for evening whiskey. The coffee table is removed from the family room, and the stereo invites the brave and tipsy onto the newly created dance floor. Traditional Punjabi music attracts parents and surprised kids in front of the camera. Our usually reserved and prudish family lets go. Couples that consciously avoid public affection now dance together on the family room dance floor. Our parents are loosening up like never before.

Malkit Singh echoes over the speakers. Today, we feel like dancing all night. The adults relish in the folk songs while kids awkwardly hop on the spot to the unfamiliar beats with their hands in the air. My dad, devoid of rhythm, claps awkwardly while circling the willing dancers. My mom is the life of the party, with her double-clutch elbow move and spin. Five-year-old me drags my drunk uncles to the middle of the room to complement my childish dancing and Ravishing Rick Rude’s pelvic swings and thrusts. This continues for hours and carries over to the second night, even though the family collectively has fewer dance moves than songs on cassette.

The family had arrived in the United States and conquered it in our respective suburban cul-de-sacs, but we never came together again the way we did in 1990. We were once happy together, a feeling that has since been disrupted by unforeseen family deaths and distance measured in decades. That was the last dance, the final time such familial sincerity was captured on tape. I relished in a celebration that was forgotten in the past. I became nostalgic for an era in which I barely lived and only recalled through the computer screen as a footnote in my family’s immigrant story.

The roots of my nostalgia are buried in the realization that it’s impossible to keep our familial culture from 1990 alive. It fissured over years as our collective immigration from India no longer exclusively defined us, when our diasporic journey became historic, rather than our only present. Time amplifies division; I fear that we’re never going to be a big family again, that my newborn son will never consider his cousins to be siblings like I did, and his summers will be spent alone, as isolation will be our final act of Western conformity.

Isolation will be our final act of Western conformity.

Still, my wife was delighted to see the home video. I laughed until I wept. Maybe the tears stemmed from the lonely holiday caused by viral distance from our families. But I don’t want to credit the pandemic for yet another breakdown; the nonnegotiable passage of time ultimately supersedes any temporary threat. It feels like something greater has been lost since the reunion, an unfettered and indescribable euphoria that exists only when the cameras are forgotten and the good life is just beginning in America.

How would the elders feel watching these simpler and more playful versions of themselves? Can innocence be restored, or is it lost forever? I still hope it can be rehabilitated by carelessly having one more drink, joyfully repeating a favorite song on the stereo—or in our case in 1990, doing one more lap around the crowded makeshift family room dance floor.