Home and away
Finding and displacing homes. What is a country if understood as home? The questions unsettle, desire remains tentative. | ||
1. For love of ‘country’

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