Home and away

1. For love of ‘country’

Finding and displacing homes. What is a country if understood as home? The questions unsettle, desire remains tentative.

2. Home and circumstance

1. For love of ‘country’

Sometime between 1955-57, at the age of 25, Munni Akhtar migrated to East Bengal along with her husband and three children. The sudden decision, she recalls wistfully, was her husband’s. In East Bengal they had another four children. Her husband’s relationship with his family was troubled, a new land beckoned, so he left without a word. Forced by her husband’s lead, Munni left with the same silence the same forgoing of goodbyes: “No matter my heartbreak from not seeing my family (parents, elder brother, beloved younger sister), I had to abide by his decision, how could I not, after marriage, he was my family. When he didn’t tell his own family, I couldn’t insist on informing mine.” She estimates it’s been 25 years since her husband’s passing. She remembers him as an outgoing, friendly man. One of his attractions to going East was that some of his friends had already gone: another family of sorts awaited him. Munni was born in Banaras into a family of Banarasi sari weavers; her husband’s family was from just outside Kolkata. In Mirpur, Munni and her husband started a sari weaving business; it lasted until her husband passed and their children went their independent ways. Now 80, Munni lives with her eldest daughter and continues to work, tracing embroidery patterns for the pittance of 5 takas per orna.

Munni has returned to visit India just once, in 1980, and only to Kolkata to see her in-laws, “but Kolkata was never home.” She has neither seen the home she departed, Banaras, nor her relatives since she first arrived. Munni isn’t sentimental about India but nurses a lingering sadness for the lost connection to her family, her heart aches and burns for her siblings,
“oi ta ki desh prem” Is that love of country?
  she wonders; to Munni, the idea of a desh remains uncertain, ambiguous. She arrived and settled in a new place on the arms of her husband; he was her “country” and when he died, Munni said she truly felt like a woman without a country, alone. She had sacrificed relatives and homeland – her sacrifices the choice of another – and with his passing, Munni had a strange realization that there was nothing left she called her own.

2. Home and circumstance

Md. Alamgir, now 65 years old, reckons he was ten or 12 when he joined his elder sister and brother-in-law in East Pakistan. In 1950, several other of his relatives had also moved there and family circumstances compelled him along the same path, though his parents remained in Kolkata, his birthplace. Alamgir is circumspect about what those troubled circumstances were – so many years have passed – perhaps reticent to dig up memories, perhaps time has blurred details. Alamgir doesn’t remember the riots, but, by the 1965 Indo-Pakistani war, many of his relatives had moved to “this part.” As he speaks of time and memory, splinters of details appear: he emigrated from Kolkata in 1962 and enrolled in the eighth grade; later he found employment at a sari store; in 1971 he returned to the family home in Kolkata but came back here after the war. The details that surface – like early memories of Mirpur as mostly a jungle, of the first house he remembers seeing built in Mirpur, of sporadic horse-driven carts, of the lone stadium, of rice for 12.5 anna and flour for 8.5 anna – are minor fragments of a turbulent life.

Photo by: Sushanta Kumar Paul

He associates his birthplace and the house in Kolkata with numerous happy memories, and Urdu with comfort. Those are his fond attachments – India and mother tongue. Everything since has come and gone. A life of responsibilities and surrenders: brothers and sisters to be taken care of, sent to school, married off; never marrying himself. He speaks of his sacrifices, though not directly: from a tin house, an uphill battle to a build a brick one, which he couldn’t hold onto; a piece of land to which he gave up his claim. Mundanities that responsibilities and sacrifices have enforced have shrouded Alamgir’s life in melancholia and punctuated it with the emotional turmoil of divided homelands. “We came here out of fear; nothing turns out well if you do something from fear.” He admits to having no friends and has lived at a community center office for the last 12 years – a home built from circumstance. Habits accustom, and Alamgir is now accustomed to solitude, the Quran his companion in his free time.