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The family is a tissue of relationships and conventions, which provides a poet with a rich store of human feeling and a structure against which to trace and analyze it. As post Independence Indian English poets write about their families, they make for themselves an inner history and give a name to their past. The re-telling of ones own family story becomes an act of faith and sometimes, an act of exorcism. Writing after Independence, and at a time when the nation was becoming more pluralistic one of the reasons for the family becoming a primary site of personal identity for a poet could be the consciousness of the fact that their place in the cosmos is determined (at least partially) by their paternity. In the poems of Agha Shahid Ali (1949-2001), his family has a very important place and is closely tied in with his memories of home. Because this is a home to which he cannot return, the memories take on an added poignancy and death becomes his adolescent password and a recurrent motif in the poems. The legacy that he inherits is heirlooms of sorrow/left in wills of ancestors and a plot in the family graveyard. Through a close reading of his poems, this paper will look at Agha Shahid Alis poetic quests of being and belonging and also in the process, arrive at an understanding of the contours of his home and homeland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]