Zohran Mamdani showed up in my family WhatsApp group. He also showed up in New York City politics, snatching a huge victory no one saw coming.
But his win wasn’t the point.
The point was that we had arrived — my family’s sudden competition to claim biradari with this kinetic smiling, charismatic new player. Could he be more than just a family friend? Could his family be in our faded photo albums? If we try hard, could he be a distant cousin?
The last time the lot of us were this giddy was, well, never. When was the last time a Kampala-born-desi-beard-trotting-Muslim had the white supremacists worried? Well, never.
More than just politics
All of us siblings were born in Kampala Nsambya Hospital. Like Mamdani’s family, Uganda is home. We have eaten its staple foods and lived its wars. For us, Zohran isn’t just a headline, and he certainly is not a meme. His dad, Mehmood Mamdani, was a friend of my dad’s since both were academicians — a visitor to our home, not just a name on a Wikipedia page. His mother, Mira Nair, filmed the critically acclaimed movie Mississippi Masala in Kampala’s streets. I’m hoping it’s true that we might’ve been extras behind Denzel Washington. No.
For us, Zohran is more than a fragment of the past; he is tracing the steps of historic exile routes our forefathers took in the chaotic aftermath of dictatorship and dispossession. Zohran’s ascent means more than just politics. It means we get to shape it. His proximity to power in America is where we can imagine a life where we immigrants weren’t kicked out on some nostalgia-driven nationalism. But we were, from India, Uganda, Pakistan, to now the United States, which reminds us of the Uganda of the 80s.
We pride ourselves on knowing men with unchecked anger. Idi Amin, the former Ugandan president whose shadow stretches long over Kampala’s vanished Asians, was our best prototype, against whom dutiful obedience was the only rational response.
Zohran Mamdani is helping us imagine a strange new world, Beatles style, where we didn’t have to be uprooted in the first place, nor silenced. A world where we are not just mentioned in the news, but are of it.
So no, our WhatsApp chatter is not delusional — we are rarely on the main stage like this. We get to be giddy. We will remain giddy. It is our time. The global muhajirs have the mic now.
The real political act
After generations of being on the margins of power, Mamdani’s mayoral campaign — a cocktail of audacity and humour — shook us to the core. He was not invited; he came anyway.
That is the real political act — not his win, but his irreverent entrance.
Conversely, the non-Mamdani rulebook of survival is — do not show up uninvited anywhere. When asked to leave, leave. If you’re built like us immigrants, you pour your identity hyphens into the American Dream. You show up for 50-hour workweeks, write a few books or make a few films, maybe save a life during a pandemic or build tech tools to improve tomorrow. You provide utility.
But run for office? Take on Trump? “To what end?” whispers my grandmother’s ghost.
If we wanderers take something on, we cannot come out as victims. In fact, we sort of hate victims of tyrants. We think it is a dumb way to die. We are the first to say we-told-you-so when they are squashed. Schadenfreude perhaps. We think that if an iron-fisted general wins and a revolutionary loses, that makes the most sense. Even if it is not moral, at least it is predictable.
Our elders survived through invisibility — never invited, never at any chief’s table, be it Ugandan, Pakistani, British or American. Even our nostalgia wears a warning label: “Things can always get worse than they already are.”
Strongmen do, however, lose their novelty after round one.
Idi Amin lost to Yoweri Museveni.
Others will lose it to others, over time.
Mamdani and the new America
Around 1990, as a kid, I may have handed welcome flowers to Museveni — Uganda’s current president — when he visited my father’s university. That was as close as my people had ever been to politics. Every revolution in our 35-year family home in Uganda left us with slogans to obey: “Uganda for Ugandans,” “Africa for Africans,” and for us ominously brown folk: “Shoot Asians at sight.”
Fear kept us small and silent.
Now that I’m in America, nostalgia is “Make America Great Again” hats and “Ultra MAGA” car stickers.
We are allowed to entertain. Our English has a lilt. Our self-deprecation fascinates. We’re exotic, right up until we’re too much — then it’s deportation notice: Next stop, South Sudan. That’s the game.
In this new America, Mamdani refuses to play.
He has gusto, he trolls the creeping-Shariah fearmongers and wields sarcasm like a shield. He called out Islamophobia in the press, poked fun at “go back to where you came from” by announcing that he is going back to Uganda. He went mocking up satirical magazine covers: “Kampala-etely Crazy!” Every insult he flipped became a lesson in not blinking. America’s youth, tired of being talked down, tuned in.
When American power flexes — defunds NPR, bullies universities for Gaza protests, scrubs aid records, calls off inconvenient investigations — you know for sure it is not democratic. We, the recovering targets of dictators, see it too clearly.
Mamdani has the legacy of that clarity, and he is undaunted. He’s marching where we used to tiptoe. We’re cheering, even if quietly, because he’s doing what we never dared to do. Nor would, frankly. The threat is not imagined; it is real.
But here’s the thing, assimilation is an illusion.
Even if you whisper, you get noticed; sometimes threatened, at times killed. My family learned this when gunmen broke into our house in Kampala’s peaceful teacher housing on campus, shot my mother near her foot, and just missed — “just” as a warning to stay in our place. From this incident, we learned that shrinking does not keep you safe.
The moment of revenge
How is Mamdani different from us lot?
He knows compliance does not guarantee safety. He knows that trying to act like the opposite of the brown savage stereotype will not spare you. The stereotype itself is a trap: perfect victims are easy targets. The world always prefers its brown people meek.
In fact, even brown people prefer brown people meek.
My two-decade-long Pakistani experiment taught me one thing — there is no room for a Mamdani among Pakistanis. They will be picked up and disappeared.
If there were a Mamdani way to do Pakistan, it would be to look like the power elite’s biggest nightmare (Ahmadi, Christian, Hindu, and Sikh), then step into office looking exactly like one.
Back to the real American contest: Not Democrat vs Republican, but David vs Goliath — we are always told ambition is dangerous, but without it, you become scenery.
Obama had his Americanism questioned. On CNBC, Colin Powell, the four-star general, was asked to answer if Obama had any Muslim ancestry at all: But instead, Colin Powell responded by pushing back on the indignity of the question: “So what if Obama is Muslim? Can’t he still be president?”
That’s America. That was 2008.
In 2025, Mamdani is that exact “what if?” kid — daring, public, and resolutely plural.
Our family, tucked safely behind digital borders, gives him the highest honour imaginable: thumbs-up emojis in our private group chat. When you win over the silent ones, you’re on to something.
America is not about this candidate’s win; sometimes it’s about who dares to try despite the threat. Mamdani raising his slingshot is a moment for every underdog.
Mamdani takes the hate, hears the death threats, but stands up to remind us that the world is not a monolith. He’s ready to pay the price for changing the narrative, and every family WhatsApp thread from Lyari to Kampala just got a little bolder, because he did.
