Crossings

1. Spinning dreams

Unending journeys. Tales, travels, and travails of looking for dreams that never were.

2. A trip too long

3. Tentative geographies

1. Spinning dreams

The poets congregated at Mohammadpur’s Green Hotel near the Town Hall Market in their reserved corner. Shamim Zamanvi, Ahmed Ilias, Naushad Noori were regular patrons, finding favor with a staff member there, Md. Seraj, a fellow emigrant, who ushered them to their accustomed table as soon as they arrived, serving them special paan and tea.  

Photo by: Sushanta Kumar Paul

Seraj lost his parents at a young age. His son Khalid Hussein narrates: “My grandfather Mohammad Shafi passed away in 1945, I suspect from alcohol addiction, I heard he was an avid taari drinker. They were from Jyoti Nagar in Bihar. My father (Seraj) was the eldest of two sons. And when the Bihar riots started, one day my dadi Shamsa Bibi instructed a Hindu man who worked at the house to bring the two brothers to safety and in front of the brothers, she and my father’s aunt killed themselves by jumping into a well in their courtyard.” A grim tale Khalid heard directly from Seraj.

The Hindu man cared for Seraj and his brother for several days before he put them in a dhoti for safety and ferried them to refugee trains bound for Jashore in East Pakistan. They spent a few years with their mama in Santahar. “They found shelter for some time, but he was a poor man himself, so as soon as he was a little older” Seraj set out for the capital and made his way to Alu Bazar in Puran Dhaka. He found work at Jeni Kabab in the Bangla Motor area. The Panjabi owner of Jeni Kabab left for West Pakistan in 1971: “The owner also advised my father to do the same but my father said, ‘I grew up here, I like it here and don’t know anyone in West Pakistan; besides, a lot of my relatives are here, my in-laws are old. We can’t all move.’ He then found work at Sufia Boarding in Nawabpur.” 

Right after the independence war, the authorities picked up Seraj and held him for a few days in the Dhaka Central Jail. When freed, an Indian soldier at the jail who had helped find Seraj for his wife advised them to relocate to the ICRC camp on Noorjahan Road in Mohammadpur. “My mother spoke in Bhojpuri and so did the soldier, so they connected in that shared language. After an arduous process, they managed to register with ICRC and after Geneva camp was built, they moved there. My father had a tough life, he was always looking for work, but they were hard to come by.” (sic) Most of his life he worked low paid jobs, for instance as a porter in Chowk Bazar and at the camp. Khalid’s mother made chhola-boot which Seraj sold at the camp; later he sold beef tripe. Around the time Khalid was born, Seraj finally found some stability serving tables at the Green Hotel. “My father used to say I brought luck. He worked at the Green Hotel for 20 years. They respected him over there.” And the owner of Pomp Tailors on Salimullah Road near the hotel would gift clothes to Seraj every Eid. It was at Green Hotel that Seraj set aside a table for the three poets, making them paan, placing their tea as soon as they walked in. He’s not around now, but a faint memory of him lingers there as the “Pakistani chacha.” 

Seraj was born in Jyoti Nagar near Patna but died in Pakistan. “In the late-1980s, a trend developed at the camp. Many of the residents started getting passports through dalals to leave for Pakistan. They got tickets on PIA and every Tuesday. On the day of weekly flights, I saw tempos full of families leaving the camp for the airport. Lots of them also took 20kg sanchi paan which they could sell in Pakistan to recoup their ticket fare. My elder brother and sisters had already left and my father wanted to join them, so I arranged a passport for him. But only seven months after his arrival in Pakistan, he suffered a brain hemorrhage, getting both home sick and physically almost incapacitated. I suspect it was that and he missed my mother, who was still in Bangladesh. And at the time, I couldn’t afford arranging another passport for my mother after paying for my father’s. He never got used to life there, constantly lamenting how there was no chhoto machh  Pakistan, no shing macch, the rice and bread too coarse, the daal not liquid enough. If this were now when I am doing much better financially, I would’ve brought him back.”  Until the day he passed away on April 17, 2003, in Pakistan, Seraj hoped to return to Bangladesh.

2. A trip too long

Khalid Hussain’s elder brother, Mohammad Zahid, left for Pakistan in 1988 or '89. “He got help from this well-known dalals at the camp, Israfil. They scoped out different routes in advance, at the time it was through Amritsar. They sent groups of 10 to 20 by charging around two to five thousand taka per person.” Zahid was a “baby taxi mechanic” at an auto repair shop, where Khalid had worked occasionally as a child too. “When I brought (Zahid) lunch I often hung around fixing things up a little and the drivers gave me
char aana aat aana.”Small change.
Eventually Zahid saved enough money to buy a vehicle he could lease to a driver. When the driver had an accident and was sent to jail, Zahid panicked: “As a camp resident, he was apprehensive, he didn’t want any trouble from the police and really feared they could come after him, so he hastily arranged his emigration to Pakistan.” The route that took him two and a half months to complete. 

He left with a dalal at five in the evening. “When he finally arrived, he sent us letters and audio tapes – those days people also sent audio tapes from Pakistan in place of letters – to describe that journey.” A route that stretched thus: Gabtoli – Saidpur – Kolkata – Delhi – Amritsar – Pakistan. “I remember in the tape, he asked us to take his harrowing journey as a cautionary tale, telling us no one should send their kids to Pakistan unless they became absolutely unable to care for them. From 1973 until 1996, many camp residents left assisted by dalals when it was possible to reach Pakistan by road, before the borders tightened, settling in Karachi’s Orangi Town.”  

3. Tentative geographies

Often memory magnifies absence. The Mohammadpur Rukhsana Begum describes from her childhood is one of water and of a routine fashioned out of its lack. “I was three when we (mother, brother, herself) arrived here, just after the war.” They are now long-time residents of the Geneva Camp. “Most of the time, we didn’t have water at the camp, only at 10am and 2am,” pre-scheduled supply times at the refugee camp, “and the lines were always so long, too crowded, impossible to take a bath there with so many people present and no privacy. We went to the Parliament lake for our baths.” The Geneva Camp neighboring the National Parliament is telling: a resolute symbol of liberation juxtaposed with decades of statelessness of the Indian emigres, the Urdu speaking communities. Geographies of stateless perilousness churn with adolescent frolics and panics, along with emergent geographies of disappearing waterways: “where Japan Garden City is now, there used to be a river, ships anchored, we went there often as well. One day, after getting out of the water, I couldn’t see my brother and thought I had lost him. So sure he drowned, I started crying.”  

Rukhsana was born in Mymensingh, her father Sageer Khan died during the liberation war there; her mother Sayeeda Khatun took her two children to the Geneva Camp after the war. “In those years, we survived on Red Cross ration, wheat, milk, barley and soon my mother found work at people’s homes, she worked at MP hostels too. Whenever they (employers) gave her food at work, my mother brought them home for us.” Rukhsana was married at the camp at a young age and is now a mother of five. “My husband works at a
cha mishtir dokan A small corner store.
. Five years after our marriage, one of my brothers-in-law went to Pakistan,
okhane giye ghor banaichhilen,Made a home there.
called us, and asked everyone to join him. My mother and father-in-law went but at the time my husband didn’t. But after a few years, we tried, got ourselves passports and visas. From Dhaka we flew to Kolkata, took the train to Bombay from Kolkata, and again got on a flight to Pakistan from Bombay. When we arrived in Pakistan, we were barred from entering, the officers informed us our visas were fake and we had to return to Bangladesh. All our in-laws were at the airport to receive us, we saw them across the barrier, passed them letters and some food we brought from home, but couldn’t leave the airport. We returned the same way we went.”