Ruptured Lives

A visit to Bangladesh in 2010 shaped the author's novel, a sensitively sketched tale of migrants' struggles

- Bhaskar Roy

“IF you want to study cultural syncretism, you need to go to Bangladesh,” historian Mushirul Hasan told me during a freewheeling conversation many years ago. The idea stuck. Much later came the urge to write India’s migration story. So long we had only listened to the expats’ tales of love and longing for home. Are there people here harking back in their evening ghettos to lost sounds and smells from their native land? The question led me to discover Bangladeshi migrants. The story with its branches and roots grew ambitiously in my mind. Then one day in 2010, I took a plane to Dhaka. I had already contacted Ataur Rahman, a senior journalist there. I was off to see the migrants’ backstory and also the liminality of faiths as folk culture.

Inside the press club, the mood was decidedly nonconformist. When I asked about Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, someone remarked that though firmly in the saddle, she was overlooking corruption by the Awami League functionaries and encouraging nepotism. “But her pro-poor programmes are popular.’’ At that point, perhaps Hasina herself did not know the danger of riding roughshod over democratic values and aspirations, that political stability was inalienably linked to the art of accommodating dissent.

Rahman took me to the Pratham Alo office. As the paper’s tone was pronouncedly plural, a reassuring liberal air prevailed around. “There are pockets where the religious right is still well-entrenched,’’ writer-journalist Anisul Hoque said. “Their strongest base is Chittagong.’’ The paper’s film critic pointed out that the biggest-ever box-office hit from the Dhaka film industry, Beder Meye Jyotsna, was actually an imitation of Bollywood melodrama. But