Alchemy of Dual Identity

"Where are you guys from?", the cab driver asked me. "We all are from India", I replied looking at the back seat where three of my fellow sailors were seated. We all were in Houston and since we Indians in the cab shared a common non-working period on the ship, we decided to explore Houston. My fellow sailors seated at the back seat were from a common place in southern India. They spoke in a language which was not only non-understandable to the American, but even after being an 'Indian', every word of it was as stranger to me as it was to the American.
Lately, over the past 5 to 7 years, i have started feeling very strongly about being a Punjabi. My grandparents like a lot others in Delhi, are muhajirs, an urdu term for people who crossed over from one side of the border to the other, during the partition. They lived their early days of marraige in Sialkot and Lahore (Punjab, Pakistan) in the pre-partition era, before crossing over to Hoshiarpur (Punjab, India). My grandfather, who was in Punjab Police at that time was asked to switch his skills for the more important Delhi Police, which resulted in my family settling in Delhi.
I have been born and raised in the capital and my love for it is natural. A a child, i used to hear stories of partition and pre-partition era from my grandmother. How beautiful the bazaars were in Lahore, how simple a life they lived in Sialkot and how at the time of partition, some of her siblings had to evade death, rape to cross over to India. How a lot of people were massacred for not being of the same faith. These stories, some full of love and others bloodshed, made me feel a sense of belonging to the land Punjab. I felt a sense of untouched connectivity to the land of Punjab in Pakistan. It made me even more desperate to visit those cities across the border where i still think my roots are. The people with whom i share a common culture, common cuisine, common language. Has then, being a Punjabi, become more important to me than being an Indian? Are my allegiances going out to Punjabis before any other citizen of my country? Has one of my 'dual identity' started to weigh heavier than the other and the larger one? Sitting that day, on the front seat of the cab, next to the American, and being unaware of the most common source of connectivity between two citizens of the same country,the language, i guess it has.