Saudade

Supposedly, my ancestors lived in/around the city of Mohenjo-daro, in the heart of the Indus Valley. I wonder if the sense of nostalgia I feel when I look at pictures of the now-skeletal remains of this city are carefully cultivated as a result of people telling me that this place is significant in terms of my family lineage.

But I'd like to think that this feeling isn't learned, that it comes from something other than a kind of indoctrinated clansmanship. I'd like to think that recognition, that particular sense of familiarity we sometimes experience, with a person or a place, that moment of saudade, comes from something deeper, more primal, a kind of psycho-geographical recognition of something not in relation to your cultivated/learned identity, but something else altogether.