Brittle, Bitter Borders

In the marshlands of the Rann of Kutch, where the border is invisible yet hotly contested, belongingness becomes tentative

- Pritha Vashishth

SITTING on an ancient-looking khaat (traditional bedstead) with carvings distinctively belonging to Sindh, the Pakistani province across the Sir Creek tidal estuary that separates it from Gujarat's Rann of Kutch, the 77-year-old Senaji Alya Goyal, in the middle of narrating how he became a resident of Kapoorashi, a border village on the Indian side, recalls a poem he once wrote. Glimpses of a village in Pakistan come swimming in the septuagenarian's words that etch a compelling image-eyes at the end of a cave that split the poet's memory of being alive-which stays long after Senaji's done reciting his poem. His eyelashes are moist with the memory of migration but his lips slowly curl into a smile as he looks at what is now his "may be home". His story doesn't let him delete the "maybe", for the uncertainty and tentativeness of any settlement remains its overriding theme-just like the marshy terrain in the Rann wetlands, which, with its creeks and streams changing shape and course with the weather and the seasons, blurs the otherwise neat line between India and Pakistan quite treacherously as it nears its southern end.

"Pakistan se humara koi lena-dena nahin hai (We have nothing to do with Pakistan)," Senaji's 14-year-old grandson interrupts his reverie. Senaji smiles and says, "Humara toh tha pacchis saal ka (But we did have a lot to do with Pakistan, for 25 years)." Rubbing an old foot full of blisters on its wrinkled skin that seems to hold time in its folds, Senaji cuts straight to Bartala in Sindh, Pakistan, where he lived until 1971-the year of the war that led to the end of the erstwhile East Pakistan and the formation of Bangladesh.

The village was just three kilometres from the international border between India and Pakistan.