A certain arrangement

1. Novel attachments

Limiting accommodations and addresses that bind. Places of community and family ties. Camps as neighborhood.

2. Provisions for survival

1. Novel attachments

After Khalid Hussain’s father, Md. Seraj, passed away in 2003, Hussain arranged to send his mother to visit family in Pakistan in 2006. But “like my father, she did not like it there. She had a three-month visa but returned within two months. My mother was born in Patna and when partition happened, they took the train to Shantahar.” Now a lawyer who has founded a minority rights and advocacy organization, Hussain was born in the Geneva Camp. He is precise, sharing details of the “seat” in the camp they were given, Block 8, Plot 534. These were their homes, but a house can however signal a structure when there was none, when camp families had berths or floor spaces with barely held partitions of burlap sacks between them: “My mother used to say children from one family ended up at an adjacent family’s space the next morning as they just rolled over there in sleep. Later those sack curtains between family rooms were replaced with bamboo partitions.”

Hussain went to a camp school until eighth grade. In ninth, he started Bangla medium school where he was harassed and taunted for his Bangla. “We were called names. Bengalis swore at us calling us ‘maura.’ But we had two sympathetic teachers – math teacher Madhab sir and geography teacher Khalil sir. Still the taunts were too unbearable for some and I remember around 10 students from our community dropped out of school. When it was time to register for SSC exams, I put down ‘Bangladeshi’ as my citizenship, but couldn’t give a camp address. Madhab sir let me use his address for the registration.”

Hussain no longer lives in the Geneva Camp and the High Court has since granted citizenship to those who were minors in 1971 and those born after, yet categories of state rarely align with complexities of lives. Hussain’s wife, who is neither Bihari nor Urdu speaking, has origins in Orissa and speaks Bhojpuri. Their children have adapted, speaking an amalgamated invention of Bhojpuri-Bangla-Urdu, and having assembled and embraced a new linguistic identity for themselves. They are no longer as attached to family origin stories, and linguistic and cultural ties that go with it. As he braces for that reality, Khalid Hussein cannot help his ambivalence at what he sees as dissolution of some ties and assimilation into others among his children.

1. Provisions for survival

From Bihar to Block F, Plot 447. Waves of change and symmetry. Name changes, place changes. Mohammad Salim was born in Mohammadpur’s Geneva Camp in 1982 to parents from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. One of six siblings, Salim and one of his sisters went to school, first to Non-Local Junior High School (the irony of ‘non-local’ is inescapable), then to Shaheen Public School from which he matriculated. “In college, I was tutoring to pay for my tuition and my brother paid for (the) bigger educational expenses; the education I wanted, (I) couldn’t pursue it for financial hardship.” In a life of provisional circumstances, footings shift daily and workarounds are a necessity. Workarounds like Salim using someone else’s address for his SSC registration, and even his “school didn’t have a registration number, they operated using another Uttara school’s registration.” Now Salim is a community liaison in the Mohammadpur camps, a synthesizer of camp stories and histories. Geneva Camp, Market Camp, CRO Camp, Townhall Camp, Central Community Camp are his roaming grounds. “The kabab is better next door,” he says of the famed Mustakim Kabab, “I prefer that one.” From his preferred kabab and biryani joints to encyclopedic knowledge of families and their houses – he can recall minute details of the transformation of houses, story-by-story – to camp life, in general, Salim’s mental inventory runs deep and wide.

Both Salim’s parents were orphaned and raised by relatives, and in adapting to changed circumstances, both had their names changed. Born Molimon Bibi, his mother’s name was later changed to Mariam Begum. “My father was 10 in 1947. His mother wouldn’t let him out of the house, tried to keep him hidden during the riots, but my father sneaked out once in a while and one day saw a man getting beaten by another man.” Salim’s grandfather had died before 1947 and his grandmother a few years after that leaving Salim’s father to be raised by his grandfather’s younger brother, Dil Mohammad. “(Dil) was a railway clerk, assistant to the officers.” Salim’s father also joined the railway. “My father’s name was Mohammad Jumrati, following Jumme-raat, which means Thursday,” later changed to Jamir Ali by his children. “He transferred to Mymensingh’s Kewatkhali in the 1950s; they lived in the railway colony and moved to the camps during the war. Geneva Camp was more of a shrub and wetland then. They lived in tents, survived on relief wheat and sweet potatoes. It was tough for them, but he rejoined the railway after the war and his salary was decent enough to raise all of us.” Molimon Bibi and Jumrati passed away few months apart in the mid-2000s.