Gazing at Neighbours: Travels Along the Line That Partitioned India by Bishwanath Ghosh

Author:Bishwanath Ghosh [Ghosh, Bishwanath]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789386224989
Publisher: Tranquebar
Published: 2017-08-14T18:30:00+00:00

At nine, chauffeured by a pleasant young man called Gautam, I set out for the countryside that hugged the northern border of Bangladesh.

I crossed River Torsa again—I had crossed it way upstream the evening before—then it was mile after mile of paddy fields, punctuated by clusters of settlements. The intermittent drizzle made it a beautifully gloomy day, the grey of the sky deepening the green of the land.

After a drive of nearly an hour, shops started showing up, indicating that we had entered a settlement that was too urban to be a village but too pastoral to be a town—the kind of place where everybody knows everybody. A large chunk of India lives in and around such settlements: urban yet rustic, modern yet traditional, and far-flung yet well-connected today.

Gautam parked his car on a vacant stretch of land by the road and said, ‘That’s where Diptiman babu lives.’ He pointed to a house across the road. I pushed opened a large gate and stepped in. The house was a very old construction, single-storied and built around a garden. There was no one to be seen as I wandered around the garden wondering where to knock or ring a bell, worried all along about stepping on a snake that might have slithered out of its water-logged dwelling.

After several minutes I spotted a woman—rather she spotted me—and she asked me to wait on a sofa in the verandah that was enclosed by grilles. As I sat there gathering my thoughts, jotting down questions I had in mind for him, Diptiman showed up: a bearded man, clad in a traditional vest and a dhoti casually tied around his waist, looking every bit an angry communist who wasn’t capable of a smile. He was my age, forty-five, but could have passed off as one of those student leaders who hang around the campus even after graduating.

He lit up a cigarette and said, ‘What happens in Las Vegas today has been happening in our society since time immemorial. Even Yudhishthir gambled. No man, no matter how great, is perfect. Everyone has their vices, but in a feudal society people accept the vices of their rulers. The boss is always right, after all. The rulers of Cooch Behar and Rangpur, whenever they sat down to play chess, would have at hand the documents of the most fertile lands. You will find that every enclave is not more than 100 metres away from a water body and tests have shown that their soil has 12 to 25 per cent more minerals than the soil in other places.’

The land swap, he said, should have ideally happened when the British were partitioning India, but then Partition was done in such a hurry—‘what should have taken at least four years was completed in a matter of five weeks!’—that the future of the enclaves remained unsettled.

It drizzled steadily as we spoke. The woman I had encountered before—she seemed to be the domestic help—brought us tea. As I took a sip and

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