“You should visit Iraq sometime,” my father says to me whenever we are involved in long conversations. I can't count how many times. And so it's been my dream to visit Iraq since I was a little girl. I don’t have family or friends in Iraq, but I still want to travel there sometime. I want to visit Iraq because of the simple fact that it's my birth land.

Three decades ago when I was born, Iraq was a peaceful country, home to thousands of people from many nations who had moved there in search of better opportunities. With vast resources of oil, Iraq was a rich land, the envy of many Middle Eastern countries.

My parents came to Iraq from India, when my father got a job as a civil engineer in Baghdad. My parents adored Iraq. They liked everything about it, except the scorching heat of summer.

Kumudha's father enjoyed taking pictures of the Iraq countryside while her family lived there.

When I was a toddler, my parents returned to India. It was around the time when the war between Iraq and Iran began, primarily over the Shatt al-Arab waterway. During this eight-year conflict, which erupted full-scale in 1980, the condition of Iraq started to deteriorate, and it was no longer a safe place to be. As conditions continued to deteriorate, thousands of Iraqi people fled to other countries.

Before my family returned to India, we had visited the hanging gardens in Babylonia and the numerous museums in Baghdad. I don’t have any memories of that time.

But my father, a lover of ancient history who savored the rich heritage of Iraq, captured the wonderful landscape, colorful culture and thousands-of-years-old artifacts with his camera.

Even though I was raised thousands of miles away, in Bangalore, I grew up listening to the wonderful stories of Iraq my parents told me. One of our neighbors even called me by the name “Iraqi.” Even today, the myriad pictures in our old family album still mesmerize me.

When I married in 1998, my husband and I moved to the United States. On March 19, 2003, when the second Persian Gulf War started and the mostly Anglo-American attack on Iraq began, I was returning home from a trip to Canada. After checking my passport, a U.S. immigration officer in Detroit asked me why I was born in Iraq.

Many of my friends are also surprised, and curious, when I tell them that I was born in the Middle East. I always look forward to their questions, because it gives me an opportunity to tell them the interesting history of Iraq.