Once, while sitting and chatting about my family, a friend of mine remarked that my father had breached the border between fondness and loyalty. I let it rattle around in my brain for a moment before I decided it wasn’t quite true.

I was born and raised, you see, in a place far away from my father’s birthplace – in another country, in fact – and as a child I could never fathom the complexity of his emotions when I would hear him quietly sing “Amar sonar Bangla, ami tomay bhalo basi” (Oh my Bengal of gold, I love you). For me at the time it was only an expression of patriotism for the Bengal that I knew. But in reality his world was bigger than that.



As I grew up, I learned that the song, written by one of India’s preeminent poets, was the national anthem of Bangladesh. The poet had migrated to India from what is now known as Bangladesh.



When the British Parliament passed an act in 1947 that would partition its colony of India into two separate independent nations, it did so in a way that divided the Bengal province into East Pakistan (today’s People’s Republic of Bangladesh) and West Bengal (a state in India). And so did it uproot millions.

While most Bengali Hindus and Christians chose to settle in West Bengal, which is where I was born, the majority of Bengali Muslims preferred to live in present-day Bangladesh. A great exodus was set underway, and many of those who crossed borders would never be able to see their birthplace again. My father, a teenager at the time, was one among that hapless lot.



Even after the passing of six decades since this time, my father’s memory of his homeland remains vivid. He recalls playmates from childhood by their names; speaks of the dirt tracks in his native Munshigunj, a district town in Dhaka, as a vast expanse of rice paddies, green fields, ponds and great rivers where he would fish with friends; the boatmen who sang haunting tunes as they anchored in the evening; the shepherds who spent the day playing flutes; the neighbors at whose houses he ate; the school teachers who struck him with canes at the slightest of provocation. All of this he remembers with fondness.



But so too is his mind imprinted with horrors. The riots that broke out between Hindus and Muslims in the 1940s left hundreds of thousands dead and trains full of bodies stopped to cross newly demarcated borders. “The two communities became the bitterest of enemies,” he says. “Yet, most of us valued humanity. Muslims found shelter with Hindu families and it happened the other way, too.” When the violence ebbed, it was the sense of shame, the despondency and the recollection of those humane gestures that settled as residue in so many peoples’ minds.

Once I read the line of an English poet: “Time marches on but memory stays, torturing silently the rest of our days.” I thought of my father who has seen one people become divided and hurtful to each other in fits of rage induced by a foreign occupier. This is what he must feel.

At the same time, one bright spot of this chaotic episode is that the cultural and natural environment in India’s West Bengal where he settled is similar to the Bengal he knew. He found in his new home that there were equally good neighbors, many of whom shared their bitter tales of separation. There were schools like the ones he attended, and, above all, he could speak his language in the alien land because Bengali is common throughout both regions.


Having spent a carefree youth on the other side of the border, however, my father was suddenly thrown into adulthood. With a family uprooted from the economic security it knew back home, he soon joined the Indian army as an officer and rose in its ranks. Often his assignments would bring him to the frontier where Bangladesh is only at a stone’s throw. “It’s like you can see your mother” he would say “but you can’t reach her.” Both the Indian and Bangladeshi governments believe their borders to be vulnerable to one another and so militaries mount on both sides, readying for a showdown that instead periodically plays out in pot shots and skirmishes. As he put it, in what I knew was a drastic understatement, “unpleasant incidents were plenty.”



When he came home on leave from his postings he would spend hours talking with my maternal grandmother about days of yore. Like him, the old woman had been forced to permanently cross from Bangladesh, leaving everything behind. 

My father’s emotions have always been contagious. They would be passed to me in the form of a longing to return to this lost land – so close and yet so distant – of his childhood.

 So when an opportunity arose a year ago to visit the bustling port city of Chittagong, Bangladesh, I felt an anxiety I had never before experienced. Bangladesh had always been a fantasy for me from hearing about it from relatives. I was excited and exulted, yet apprehensive about whether reality would match the picture I had in mind.


When I set foot in the country, it was as if I woke up from a dream. I thought this is the land where my forbearers had lived and this is where I would have lived had there been no intervention of fate. I looked around and was struck by the similarities the city bore with those of West Bengal – the chaotic streets, the rivers, the roadside shops, the simple and friendly people, a casual and lackadaisical lifestyle, the people’s fondness for politics and cultural activities and that strangely familiar smell which established an instant connection. As I traveled out of the city, I saw paddy fields on both sides of the roads, just like the picture I had conjured from hearing my father’s accounts. The region is as green as you can imagine. The villages, its people, the grazing cattle and the shepherd who played a bamboo flute – all made me forget my existence across the border.

When I did return to India, my father’s eyes lit up when I entered the house. He was so anxious he could not ask me any questions. Eventually he managed, “Is the country the same as what I describe?” 


“Yes,” I said. His eyes were moist, but he was happy that I could see the country where he grew up.

 It was also my destiny to marry a woman whose grandfather had immigrated to India from Scotland and whose mother had fled religious persecution in Tibet for the Indian highlands of Kalimpong, near Nepal. Her household was also a place tethered to different parts of the world, where Nepalese, Tibetan and Celtic cultures informed her identity as much as India did.



In order to pursue a career in journalism, I would move with my family to the Middle East. Our children have become yet another generation of migrants. We have lived together in the Sultanate of Oman and now in the United Arab Emirates, which is its own concoction of people from around the world who come to make a better life. Today the kids are broadly familiar with cultures including Bengali, Nepali, Tibetan, Scottish, Indian and Arab. This may not compel them to share their love between countries, as my father does, but nevertheless it will likely broaden their outlook.



Some years ago, my father explained to me his complex idea of fondness and loyalty, not a divided one as some would mistake it to be. “We are not as much divided psychologically as we are politically,” he says. For him it’s still one Bengal and not the Bengals we see on current maps.

The partition, however, taught him the hard way lessons of tolerance, love and respect for humanity that transcend creed, class, idiom and country. And, hence, I had little trouble convincing him about my decision to wed a non-Bengali woman even though marrying someone from outside one’s own caste and religion is still taboo in middle-class Indian society, even more so for people of his generation.



As our children grow up hearing these tales and experiencing their multicultural lives, I like to think they will feel the same way: it is better to respect others no matter their faith or where they call home at a time when the world is in such dire need of this kind of open-mindedness. My father hopes so, and so do we. 


Soumik Mukherjee is a writer, editor, photographer and painter based in the United Arab Emirates. His write-ups have been published by The Statesman (New Delhi and Kolkata editions), www.indiatimes.com (The Times of India group), Hindustan Times, Khaleej Times, Oman Tribune and The National.

Copyright Last Exit 2009