ERFAN BADAT prizes his Barbadian citizenship. Coming from a village in the western Indian state of Gujarat, he declares, with a broad smile: “I am a Bajan now.”
The official Barbados citizenship certification letter presented to him by Prime Minister Freundel Stuart just over a week ago is a treasured memento of the decision he took to leave the vast sub-continent of India in 1993 for this speck of an island in the Atlantic Ocean.
“When I was leaving, it was very hard for me,” he admitted. “I was leaving my homeland. I was leaving my parents to come down to Barbados and even when I come down here for a few months I was feeling a little down. It was really hard.”
“Barbados was a small place and I left a big place. I had to depend on my wife to give me the company.”
He left it all behind for the hand of Barbadian-born Zainad Piprawala, a second generation Barbadian Indian whose grandparents came here from India.
Read the full story in today’s SUNDAY SUN.
