New Delhi, July 31: SEATED inside a hotel in Paharganj, Leela Ramotar feels acutely displaced. Guinea is her country of birth, London is where she grew up, and New York is where she works. But for the past two weeks, the 54-year-old, who teaches immigrant children in Manhattan, is scouting India’s remote corners, desperate to find her roots.

And in an instant, a certain Buxar in Bihar and Rai Bareilly and Ballia in Uttar Pradesh have come to mean more than just Hindi belt towns in her country of origin. For those are places where, Ramotar says, her roots lie, and she insists on tracing them.

Over the last fortnight, Ramotar has travelled to the three cities, and battled communication problems and the sweltering heat, to trace families of her great-grandparents who left for Guinea in 1868 on a ship called ‘Trevelyn’ from Calcutta’s Garden Beach. “In Guinea, we were always aware that we belonged to India. But in my 30s, I really wanted find out who I was.”

A year ago, Ramotar managed to lay her hands on three immigration certificates from the National Archives of Guinea that were issued to her ancestors after they migrated from India for work. With help from Guinea’s historian Dr Mangru, she got in touch with Delhi-based family historian and genealogist Dr Chandrashekhar Tiwari, who is now assisting her.

Ramotar’s identity crisis reflects in her documentaries as well — they deal with issues of identity, race, colour, and history. And in a country where Afro-Caribbeans and Indo-Caribbeans are still antagonistic, Ramotar says finding her roots as an Indo-Caribbean in Guinea would be one of the ways of finding her voice.

“The Indo-Caribbean community lost immensely after immigration to Guinea,” she says, “and the most important was loss of space, a sense of belonging. That is why it is so easy to keep moving to cities and countries without belonging anywhere.”

Ramotar says she does not feel like a resident of Guinea, the United States, or Britain despite possessing citizenship of all three countries. She hopes to find someone she can call her “family”. But with just immigration certificates in hand and inadequate land records in district collectorate offices, Ramotar has had a mixed bag of experiences tracing her genealogy.

In Ballia, her hunt for Deepani — her father’s maternal grandmother — led her to a family but, unlike her, they remembered nothing of a woman who existed four generations ago. Land records of Ballia list Deepani’s father Lalu, though. She found none in Rai Bareilly and Buxar.