It began with the mystery of the invisible children.
I read in a newspaper report that eight out of ten children who enrolled in West Bengals primary schools dropped out before they completed secondary education. Where did they go? The statistical handbook of the state, from which the report had quoted, could not give a clue. But eight out of ten was a big number, nearly twenty times more than the official number of child labourers in the state. Where were they if not in schools? I couldnt remember noticing many out-of-school children except in the dingy crevices of my city, in squatter settlements and around railway stations.
I fished around for some time until I sensed that this required a formal approach. I applied for, and received, a grant from the University Grants Commission (UGC) for a research project. This gave me a passport to go to places not on tourist maps, visit institutions and interview people. This was in 2006. The Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, the programme for universal primary education, was in its sixth year. I planned to complete the project in two years.
But I had more on my hands than I had imagined. Soon after I began my travels and talked to people, I discovered that universal primary education is a prism: it refracts a spectrum of economic, social, cultural and even ecological issues, which usually remain muddled. Thus, what began as a straightforward enquiry grew into a labyrinth, my curiosity hardened into an obsession, I lost my tree in the forest. After two years, I was still making trips to out-of-the-way places in south Bengal and also in eastern Odisha. I couldnt complete the project and returned the grant to the UGC.
But what I think I learnt during that time was how to listen to stories, extraordinary stories told by seemingly ordinary people, about themselves and about the land on which they lived.
Deltaic Bengal is a young landmass built by silt-carrying rivers a waterborne land, which is still being made and unmade. Its fertility and accessibility through its rivers and the sea have always drawn people agriculturists, artisans, merchants, freebooters and colonizers making it one of the most prosperous and historically significant regions in the subcontinent.
However, all that is in the past. The majority of the people who now live on the ruins of a once highly commercialized land are either tied to subsistence farming or are transiting all over the country to work in its informal sectors. Battered by cyclones, floods, and the rough hand of history Partition their story is one of untold misery but also of remarkable grit.
How different these stories are from the one we have been telling each other and the world the story of a lazy, argumentative, culture-loving community who love their adda, mishti doi and Tagore. This, I realized, is the story of my kind of people, a small segment of the more than nine crore who originate from the Indian side of the Bengal Delta and speak Bangla, the educated urban middle-class and mostly upper-caste Hindus: the bhadralok.
The realization made me undertake the most difficult of journeys: to my own space, my roots, without the blinkers of self-delusion.
When I began these journeys, the Left Front was still in power in West Bengal. But the formidable red bastion was being hollowed out, particularly in rural areas. It soon crumbled sooner than anyone had expected. The well-oiled machine of a party society gave way to disorder and improvisation. But this also pulled down old walls for the winds of change to blow. Since then, several state welfare schemes targeted at young people and students, particularly girl students, have shown positive results. But, as elsewhere in the country, the shift towards privatization of education has accelerated; many state-run schools in urban areas have closed down for lack of students. Some of the descendants of the early settlers, those gritty men and women who built a life from scratch, have become dependent on government programmes. With the returns from farming dwindling, the labour migration has continued. As I write these lines, nearly two years of a pandemic and lockdown have pushed this population to the brink. The schools are closed, and an uncountable number of children have dropped out.
Meanwhile, the climate crisis has worsened. Four major cyclones have ravaged coastal Bengal in about two years, turning swathes of land practically uninhabitable. But people still hang on, bracing themselves for the quirks of nature and the state, for the next cyclone or the Citizenship Act, because they have nowhere else to go.
I have tried to tell their stories, stories rooted in their locales. I have changed the names of people, primary locations and institutions throughout the book. Names of organizations like Astika Agro and Maserio are fictitious. In some cases, I have fashioned a character out of more than one real person, bending the factual to be truthful. Thus, Amitava, Radha-Rokeya, Gouranga-da, Bishu, the Sens, the Guptas and many others exist only on the pages of this book. This also applies to places like Ichhaipur, Seshergram, Adivasipara, Dumurdi and a few others. Two of the hamlets I visited have since been washed away. In our waterborne land, this is in the natural order of things. What remain constant here are just some concepts, an imaginary line or a centre of power, the Border or the Party, always in uppercase.
I made the trips at different times, for over a decade, by boat, bus, train, toddy-palm canoe, vano (motorized tricycle), and a motorcycle on whose rear-view mirror was printed:
OBJECTS IN THE MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR .
In the end, all that has remained with me are some objects words and images, a glint in the eye and the murmur of a sigh which got closer and closer until they seeped within me, and began to whisper with each other in the recesses of my memory.
September 2021
Kolkata
16 VIDYALANKAR ROAD
I want to go home, said Ma, my mother. She had pancreatic cancer, stage four. By home she meant our ancestral house in Gouripur, a small old town forty kilometres from Kolkata, by the river Hooghly. She had spent three-fourths of her life there. I want to go home. Take me home! Ma insisted, a new childlike obstinacy cracking her voice. We, her children and in-laws, debated the merit of her demand until we all agreed that she had a point. Ma had the right to spend her last few days in this world at a place she could claim as her own in the teeth of time. Nobody should snatch it from her. So we shifted her from the aseptic blue hospital to our old house at 16 Vidyalankar Road. We set up a critical-care facility there, as far as practicable, and got in touch with an agency for round-the-clock attendant service. They sent us two women who divided the day between them.
Bharati Das worked the day shifts. In her late twenties and married, she came from Mayapur, a small town one-and-half hours distance by a suburban train. She was a lively, caring woman who did more than her assigned duty; shed wash Mas clothes and sometimes cook a special stew for her. Perhaps this was part of her professional grooming, but soon she wormed her way into Mas enfeebled heart. And this really mattered. Bharati called her Mashima, aunt, and Ma would wait for her to arrive every morning with lucid expectancy. A rare calm would light up her pain-ravaged face when Bharati propped her up against a bolster and combed the few remaining strands of hair on her scalp and talked with her in a voice that one reserves for little girls.
