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PRASHANT PANJIAR/LIVEWIRE IMAGES FOR TIME
Going home: Aparisim Ghosh takes in the scenery in Bangladesh
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Getting directions in Bangladesh is a very inexact science. On the final leg of my journey to Goalonko village, in my anxiety to get there as soon as possible, I keep asking—a pedestrian, a passing motorist, my own taxi driver—how much further I have to go. "Beshi duur naa..." Not far, they keep saying. And how long would it take to get there? "Beshi khun naa..." Not long. For a compulsive clock-watcher, this is incredibly frustrating. I remind myself that no member of my family as been here in 55 years, so what's a couple of hours?
I'm in Bangladesh as a proxy for my Dida, or grandmother, Aparna Dasgupta, making a journey she had dreamed about most of her adult life. At the Partition of India in 1947, she and her husband, Dinesh Chandra, were forced to flee their village in what was then designated East Pakistan to start a new life in India. I've come to find that village, to find my grandparents' home. My grandfather died just 14 years after the move to Calcutta, and Dida raised their son and four daughters mainly on handouts from her brothers-in-law. It was a humiliating comedown for the bride of a wealthy, influential family, but she bore it with stoic fortitude. Only occasionally did she allow herself to escape, in her mind, to Goalonko. Her stories about the village made it sound like a rural picture-postcard, full of happy people and abundant farms. Most of her stories centered on the Dasgupta family seat, known as Doctor Bari, or doctor's house—my great-grandfather, and his father before him, had both been medical men. As Dida told it, the main house was a two-story structure, rare for the time, and was surrounded by stand-alone rooms for the family temple, kitchen, bath, cowshed, clinic and dispensary. On all sides there were lotus-filled ponds and vast fields of rice and jute. It was, in short, a Bengali Tara. Dida always said she would go back to Doctor Bari one day—"when my grandchildren grow up and take me."
But I always sensed that, deep inside, she didn't really want to return. Of the 2.5 million East Bengalis who came west, few ever go back, even for a brief visit. Maybe they don't want to deal with the trauma of seeing their old homes occupied by the very people who drove them away. Or maybe they worry that the real Tara could never measure up to the one in their imagination. Anyway, we never got to test Dida's desire to go home to Goalonko; she passed away in 1991. Now I would make the journey for her.
From Calcutta, photographer Prashant Panjiar and I take a commuter train to the India-Bangladesh border, and from there a taxi to the town of Jessore. Next stop: we're not sure. Goalonko is too small to register on a map, and with Dida gone, it was hard to get precise directions; all I have is a sketchy guide from one of her nephews. In the old days, the village was under the jurisdiction of the Kotalipara police station, which was in Faridpur district, so we decide to start our search there. Getting to Faridpur would involve an eight-hour train ride with two changes. This should be no problem, because I love traveling by train.
I quickly fall out of love when the Parbatipur Rocket rolls up at the Jessore station's only platform. It is a sorry excuse for a train: five smelly passenger cars that seem to have been constructed out of rust, pulled by a wheezy diesel engine that is capable only occasionally of exceeding 60 km/h. In the cars, some passengers sit on uncomfortable benches and pick absently at remnants of decades-old foam cushioning; many sit on the floor, using old rags or newspapers to protect their clothes from the ocher stain of rust. Those lucky enough to have a window seat lean out to escape the stench of stale urine. Most of the Rocket's passengers are dirt-poor, and many can't afford the $1.50 I paid for my ticket. The train conductor, Mohammed Abdul Mutalib, is a lenient man, asking only that those who haven't paid sit on the floor. "In a poor country, it is unreasonable to expect everybody to buy tickets," he explains. "And anyway, they probably aren't going very far."
Nobody goes very far on the Rocket. The Bangladeshi railway system is so limited and so inefficient, you can get to almost any place faster, more comfortably and almost as cheaply by bus. An hour after we set out, Prashant and I are the only people in our compartment who had boarded at Jessore. Four hours into the train ride, a passenger tells us we shouldn't be going to Faridpur at all. The administrative map of Bangladesh has changed substantially since it became an independent country in 1971, and the Kotalipara police zone is now part of Gopalgunj district. And the district's eponymous capital is in the exact opposite direction.
We hop off the train and take a "micro"—a minivan taxi—to Gopalgunj; it's nearing nightfall when we arrive. We stay at a state-run guesthouse, its opulent, air-conditioned rooms a stark contrast to the squalid tenements on the main road. Here, we find a map of Kotalipara, just 30 km away. There's still no sign of Goalonko, and nobody in Gopalgunj seems to have heard of it, but the map shows the location of some other villages Dida spoke of. Armed with this reassuring information, we leave Gopalgunj the following morning, expecting to arrive at Goalonko inside the hour. But despite several reassurances from passers-by that it is "not far," it's nearer lunchtime before we get there.
The village is almost exactly as my grandparents left it. Goalonko is as green as Dida said it was, green from the banana and guava orchards, banyan trees, bamboo forests and jute fields that ring almost every compound. The houses, mainly of mud and wood, are scarcely visible through the dense foliage. The village is still dotted with lotus-filled ponds, where children splash around in the afternoon heat and men drop their nets for Tilapia fish. Most surprising of all, what was the Dasgupta home is still known as Doctor Bari.
Its current owner, Sikandar Ali, is a jolly figure in a white salwar kameez and a full gray beard, with twinkling eyes that greet strangers without a hint of suspicion. I begin to explain my visit, but he doesn't need to hear the full story. Rural folk know the tug of one's roots, and Ali instinctively understands that I've come to find mine. "I have waited a long time for this," he says, interrupting my lengthy explanation. Ali decided against renaming Doctor Bari, he says, because he wanted to "preserve a little bit of the past." Although not a native of Goalonko—he moved here from another village—he has painstakingly researched Doctor Bari's antecedents, and speaks of previous residents as though they had been his friends.
Doctor Bari's two-story main building has long since disappeared, stripped for its bricks, wooden floors and roof. The old temple has gone too, submerged when one of the fish ponds was expanded. What now passes for the compound's main structure is Ali's home, made from mud, wood and tin sheets. Here he conducts tutorials for local schoolkids and, on the side, makes homeopathic potions.
As word of our arrival spreads across the village, dozens of children come around to see the foreigners. Most of the grown-ups are in the fields. One exception is Kaji Shahjahan, a descendant of the family to whom the Dasguptas had entrusted their home before leaving Goalonko. Now the health inspector of the village, he arrives at Doctor Bari to dispense free vaccinations for children. As an assistant jabs wailing babies and mollifies their irate mothers, Shahjahan regaIes me with the exploits of the Dasgupta doctors. People traveled hundreds of kilometers to consult them. "It used to be said that no matter how sick you were, if you could make it to Doctor Bari, you would be cured," Shahjahan says, his voice hushed with awe. So Dida's fantastic stories about the Dasgupta family had been true after all. I feel ashamed for having doubted her.
Shahjahan, Ali and other village elders invite us to stay the night, but we have to get to Dhaka, a six-hour ride away. They implore me to return, with my mother and any surviving members of the Dasgupta family. Before we leave, I ask Ali if I can take a fistful of earth for my mother from the family compound. Overcome with emotion, he grabs my hand and says: "I'm just the caretaker. This is still her father's home."For good measure, he has one of his nephews scramble up a guava tree to get me some fruit. "Bring these to your mother," he says. "And tell her they came from her father's tree." The guavas are small, hard and at least two weeks short of ripeness. But when I get home a couple of days later, my mother scarfs them down like they are the sweetest fruit in the world.
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