G oing down memory lane is special. How far can I go in time? Well, as far back as I can remember! A recent journey was special. To paraphrase T.S. Eliot, “In the end was my beginning.”
I was born in Dacca, now Dhaka. My parents came to India just before Partition as refugees, with me a toddler. But my parents kept their own, and my memories are alive with photos and spoken references to people, places and events.
I always had an urge to visit Dhaka, but never got an opportunity. However, I recently had the good fortune to revisit my birthplace when I accompanied my husband who went to attend a conference.
Dhaka is like any large Indian city: beautiful in parts and sadly dying in others. There are people everywhere, the traffic is chaotic, and there is a cheerful disregard for rules. There are memorials and monuments that mark the history of the capital of the relatively new country. A good number of Muslim women I saw wore the bindi. They said a Bengali woman always wears one! Burkhas were fewer than in India.
We were able to locate the laboratory building in the Jute Research Institute where my father worked. A Muslim girl student took us around the Dhaka University campus, where I hoped to see the house where we once lived. There were moments when I was emotionally overcome — imagining my father working at his microscope in the lab, and imagining that the hoary trees under which I must have stumbled and played were speaking to me.
Nearby we observed preparations for an event. Our guide told us it was for Saraswati pooja. She said all the departments of Dhaka University celebrated the festival, in a spirit of religious amity. Both India and Bangladesh have national anthems written by Rabindranath Tagore. He is “gurudev” in India and “guruji” in Bangladesh.
In today’s growing deserts of hate, divisiveness and intolerance, it was a memorable oasis of amity, love and acceptance where, as gurudev famously sang, “the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls”. At least as far as I could see.
People went out of their way to help locate the places of my earliest memories. Though I was a foreigner, a Hindu from India, people who we met treated me with affection and acceptance as a daughter of the land. Again and again people remarked on the entry in my passport showing my birthplace as “Dhaka, Undivided India”, bringing out the fact that it is politics that divides peoples and lands. I believe the nostalgia was in more hearts than mine alone, when I reached the end (or is it the beginning?) of my memory lane.
sg9kere@live.com
