We fly half-way around the world to New Delhi. After almost sixteen hours of non-stop flight, we land at almost midnight through a dark sky and an almost pitch dark earth below with few twinkling lights. My wife and I are exhausted. Having to catch a flight the next morning to our final destination, we simply wanted a bed for a few hours to rest our tired bodies. I simply cannot sleep in an airplane. So we take refuge at a nearby Holiday Inn for a few hours. We finally board a plane in the morning for the short two-hour flight. As we fly east through a sunny blue sky, a strange excitement fills my heartwith the thought“I am going home,which I had left behind many decades ago”. Or am I really? I raise the window shade and look for any familiar signs fromthe past. On my left, at a distance, I see snow-capped mountains, the sun brightly reflecting from the white peaks. The tall one is Kanchenjunga,I recall. As we get closer to our destination, I see undulating blue hills and greenvalleysand a big rivermeandering through the valley with hills towering over it on both sides. That is my River. Growingup on its banks, running around on its sandy beach, flying kites, rolling an abandoned bicycle rim with a stick, and riding canoes seems like eons ago.These were the simple pleasures of my childhood. It all comes back in a flashwhich has failed to fadein time. As the plane slowly makes the final approach towards land, I see rice fields below and someone trying to till the land with a primitive plough drawn by two bullocks. Even that picture has not changed much.
We finally land and disembark. The place is so familiar, yet so unfamiliar. People are hustling for their baggage, or to catch a taxicab. Cab drivers are hustling to catch a customer. Unlike the white, black, and brown people of different shapes and sizes who surround me in America, these people look like me. I understand what they are saying because many speak in my mother tongue which I generally don’t hear in America as soon as I get out of my house in the suburbs. In America,it is mostly English with different accents like the cowboy twang or creole English or an African American twist. We exchange greetings courteously but with an indifference.A “good morning” or “how are you” with perfect strangersfills the void in our communication or breaks an invisible barrier. But we don’t really know or have not taken the time to know each other. Sometimes I even say “Buenas Dias” or “Como Estas” if I hear someone speaking in Spanish. There are lots of Spanish-speaking people as well. Regardless, we all live like strangers yearning for our old home; yet something binds us together. Maybe it is the freedom, maybe it is the lure of money, or maybe it is for the sake of a better life for our children.
Here in my old town of yester years, I understand what they are saying, but I don’t really know them. Perhaps they resent our relative success; perhaps they are proud of us as a homeboy doing well. Regardless, we are strangers. The communication gap appears to be as wide as the Atlantic and a continent I just crossed to get here.It is strange to feel like a stranger amidst familiarity. The airport has changed too. It has a new name, Lokpriya Gopinath Bordoloi International Airportnamed after a local hero. The terminal building is relatively new and much bigger. It was a small airport inmy poor,old rural town when I flew out of it for the firsttime to go to America via New Delhi almost five decades ago. Now it is an international airport as if waiting for the arrival of an international flight soon. Perhaps it wants to compete with airports like JFK or De Gaulle or Heathrow someday. Perhaps they are waiting to welcome white, black, and brown people from places like where I come from.
My wife’s younger sister and her husband are here to pick us up and to take us to our hotel. Yes, we are staying at a hotel like a visitor, because we don’t know if we should burden any relative as they are busy making a living and raising a family of their own at a place where life is still hard. Besides, once your parents are gone and once you leave your parental home, it is really difficult to figure out if you still have a home that you used to call home. As my brother-in-law drives towards town, my wife starts a conversation with her sister who was sitting in the frontnext to her husband andI keep looking on both sides of the street with a childlike curiosity. I see buildings mushroomingeverywhere. The low lying areas or the wetlands that I knew are gone. They have been replaced by shops, and high-rise apartments. There are still a few
brick kilnsstanding and belching smoke. I also see a few children, perhaps teenagers, squatting, and working with their hands. We crawl at a snail’s pace as we hit a traffic jam ahead. People are everywhere, either crossing the road or merely standing to watch the world go by while spitting that red color betelnut juice on the ground. Hand-drawn carts, rickshaws, motorbikes, trucks, automobiles, crowded city buses, and pedestrians – all fighting for a piece of the road. Honking, auto exhaust fumes, and dust fill the air. There is thisunusual mix of smellsthat I am not used to anymore. Perhaps it is the combination of auto exhaust fumes, smoke from a fire to clear land for new buildings, smokes from smokestacks of industries to run the modern-day economic machine for more progress, and perhaps even odor from sweating scrawny bodies of the poor pushing vegetable carts to make a living. I even see a frail old woman trying to dry some cow dung patties in the sun.It is the old and the new trying to live together in a very stressful relation. The new wants to push the old out. But itis definitely not the sleepy, poor little town I knew. My old town was cleaner I thought. But it is still my hometownand it has changed beyond recognition. My old town is trying to be a fashionable young lady wearing makeup to presenta new look with high-rises, automobiles, malls, and neon signs, trying to lure the mortals seductively; in the midst of thisthere are poor, tired, hungry, homeless masses as invisible and discarded refuse of the society in the shadow of modernity. It appears that the more she changes, the more she remains the same.
We arrive at the hotel. The hotel is like any other Western hotel. The nicely designed reception area with beautiful young women in saris are taking care of customers with a smile. There is the usualconcierge area, the bellhops, the high ceiling of the lounge area with a grand piano at one corner. A young woman, unmindful of the guests coming and going, is playing Beethoven’s Fur Elise.Theambience gives an aura not of my poor old town but that of something transplanted from the west. The old town is trying to make a new statement. Butlooks can be deceiving. We settle down in our room. I see through a window the green hills at a distance with buildings sticking outlike pockmarks. I see what appears to be a rice fieldin another direction. The tall rice plants are swinging and dancing to the tune of a gentle breeze.
Being too tired and lazy to go down to the restaurant,I call room service for a simple lunchof rice and curry. My wife just wanted to rest for the day. We plan to spend the following day at her sister and brother-in-law’s place. So, I decide to go out and check out my old town, especially the area where I grew up from my childhood through the high school days. My wife is fine with that. Being cautious as usual, sheasksme to just be careful in a new place.
The front desk gets me a taxicab. I take off with an unknown excitement and apprehension. The driver is a local young man and knows the town. He politely asks me in English where I want to go. I describe him where to go as I do not have a particular address in mind and ask him if he is an Assamese. He replies in the affirmative. Then our conversation changes to Assamese. He has an undegraduate degree, but he could not find a job. So he took a low interest loan offered by the government to unemployed youth and bought this automobile to run as a taxicab. Life is hard he says. He has the loan payment to make every month, look after his ailing mother and a younger sister living in a very small place in thecity. The city is becoming unaffordable for people like him. He drives his car from dawn till midnight to earn enough to survive. There are too many taxis and not enough passengers for all. Fortunately he was able to link up with this hotel for taxi service. It pays a little more because people staying here generally pay more. His mother wants him to get married soon before she leaves this world. He has a girl friend. Things are changing for the better, he says. Boys and girls fall in love andcan marry as they wish. Parents, he says, have reluctantly accepted thesechanges. He saysthat he cannot think of getting married and bringing her to his family shack. He is trying to save as much money as he can. I was impressed with his openess and attitude. Life is definitely not easy if you are barely making a living. But the sun shines at the end if you do not quit. It reminded me of my childhood when we grew up in a house with a leaky thatch roof, dirt floor, and kerosene lamps right here in this town decades ago. We even had milk cows that I had to round up every evening after school from the beggar and leper colony by the River.
After fighting the traffic congestion and listening to the deafening noise of honking we arrive at Panbazar by the Riverside near a flower garden of my childhood that has somehow been spared from the onslaught of progress. I ask him to stop and wait for me on the roadside by the River close to the garden.There is a giant gate still standing by the River next to the garden as a symbol of the colonial past. It is called the Northbrook Gate built to welcome the British Viceroy Lord Northbrook in 1874. It was the riverine entrance to Assam and to my old town for the white rulers. My childhood home stood right across from this gate and across the street. I take a turn, cross the street, and walk towards that old place. The Shiva Temple built even before the colonial rule still stands proudly proclaiming the era of the Ahom Kingdom. The dome of the temple is surounded by modern high rises. Lord Shiva does not sit at the highest point here, but at the bottom in the shadow of high rises. I look around for the little restaurant calledthe Lucky Cabin that used to serve hot tea and samosas. It’s gone. And the book store called the Book Syndicate, where I had purchased my first Assamese alphabet book to start my elementary schooling, is gone too. As I try to walk through the tall and wideentrance of the temple to get to my old home next to it, I see beggars in tattered clothes and with sunken cheeks extending hand for alms sitting and leaning against the perimeter wall. Yes, the past still lives here.
As I enter and look towards the back on the right side of the temple hoping to see the two old houses with thatch roofs side by side facing the River, I see instead two Assam type houses in their place with tin roof, wooden posts, plastered walls, and glass windows. The windows and doors are all shut. In between the two houses there is a wide gate with a metal sheet, but it is not the one I was used to.As I stare at these two houses, slowly they begin to transform right in front of my eyes. The roof changes to thatch roofs, the wooden posts to bamboo posts and the bigger house is leaning one way from the pounding of seasonal storms. The gate turns into the old wornout door made of discarded pieces of corrugated tin sheets nailed to a wooden frame hanging from a wooden post on one side. It is the same door that used to determine the inside and outside of our world.
Not too long ago through that door a new bride would walk in. The first one to go out through that door and never to return was my disabled older brother. He was only eighteen. I remember how a giant wood fire had engulfed his body as he was cremated. Thenmyoldest sister-in-law, followed by myfather who had gone out through that door for the last time never to return again. Through that door our cows would return every evening with me following them. That was my daily chore after school to round them up from a beggar and leper colony by the River about a mile away. Out went through that door for the last time myoldest brother’s second daughter whocommitted suicide by jumping into the River to end a tragic love story. Then anotherolder brother had gone out through that door forever and simply disappeared as he was banished from the family for an unacceptable act of love with his niece. Through that door the “Untouchables” came to clean our out houses. Someone had given them a new name, “Harijan”, meaning God’s people. That really did not make any difference. In came through that door a midwife to help deliver babies of our oldest sister-in-law and we would eagerly wait to hear the cries of thenewborn. The sound of cries of a newborn was a moment of happiness for others. Only the baby and the mother knew what birth pangswere. And the beggars and the lepers stopped short of that door right outside. They would say in a desperate voice so that our compassionate mother could hear from inside – “mother, little rice” (আই, অলপচাউল)in Assamese,“mother, I am very hungry”(মাতাজী, বহোতভুখাহুঁ)in Hindi, “mother, please help with a penny (“poisa”)”(মাগো, একটিপইচা)in Bengali. My poor mother’s heart would cry out and she would make sure no one left empty handed, although we hardly had enough to feed our own family at times.
Suddenly, I hear Mother, her voice coming from the smaller house inside, which was our kitchen. I hear the mooing of cows from the rear of the house on the left. I hear some young girls giggling. They must be myoldest brother’s daughters. I pause and then slowly step forward. I knock on the gate between the two houses. Suddenly it becomes eerily quiet. There is no voice of my mother, no giggling, no mooing. I hear nothing. Then I hear shuffling of a pair of feet. Someone is approaching the door. The door opens and I see the familiar long corridor where Mother used to rest if she ever gota little break from her kitchen. In front of menow stands an old looking frail young man. I guess he is close to 50. He looks at me and makes hand gestures. I try to understand. I realizehe cannot speak. I say something to him in Assamese. He made some sound that did not make any sense. Then he made hand gestures again. I realize he can’t hear either. I experiment with hand gestures trying to explain who I am. I think he understands. Then it dawns on me that he must be the youngest son of my oldest brother and the current owner of the property. All I remember is that he was a little boy when I left this place for good. He was losing his hearing as a little boy. I suppose he had become completely deaf, perhaps for lack of medical care. Then slowly he lost his speech too. A lonely man in a lonely world as if waiting for the final call. I meant to ask him what happened to his two older brothers. But I can’t explain. Did they make their own home elsewhere and abandon him at this old place? Somehow I manageto say good bye with a wave of my hand.
I walk back slowly with my head down towards the street. There is so much going on in my head. There is no one to see me off by the street, not my mother, not even my disabled brother as they always did. I was in a trance as if I had just come out of a haunted house. But that was my home once, full of love, laughter, noise, sibling quarrel, happiness,and sorrow. Where is my home? As I walk out through the entrance of the Shiva temple back to the hustle and bustle of the street adorned by high rises, I glance to the right looking for a two-storiedAssam type house with a garage at the front that used to house a black Maurice Minor. That was a rarity back then. Only the rich had a few automobiles in the town. I imagine a girl looking down and waving at me from the second-floor balcony of that house. I had fallen in love with that girl from that house. I should not have. I had returned from America to ask for her hand to make a journey together. I was not a poor boy anymore. That did not matter. Caste became a barrier and my love was rejected. Perhaps things would have been different if I were a white American. Whiteness overcomes caste and religious barrier, even today.
As I walk back towards the taxi waiting by the Riverside, I stand stillon the high bank staring at the River and the sun that is about to go down in the middle of the River. This River was my mentor, my friend, my solace. Along with the temple and the Northbrook Gate, my River is the only thing that has not changed. This River and I are inseparable. I remember clearly the Sun going down in the middle of the River at a distance between two hills, spreading its glorious golden-orange hue on the ripples of the ever-flowingRiver. It was the most beautiful picture of a colorful evening drawn by Mother Nature. It looked like the imaginary heaven people talked about. Now there is a haze all-around of polluted air of a modern city with high-rises and automobiles, where invisible poor people and beggars also loiter in the shadowstrying to defy death. All I see is a pale, dying sun tryingto reflect the last glimmer of hope embracing the immortal River.
Where is home? I have been roaming like a Bedouin pitching a tent from place to place. I left this place to pitch a tent in the midst of strangers and moved many times. I suppose, my daughters would eventually want me to move to a nursing home when I am on my last leg waiting for the call to take me to the final home. Where is home?
As I approach the taxi, the driver opens the door. We head for the hotel. There is no home, only a hotel and something to take you from hotel to hotel. I remember what A. C. Maffen had said, “Our life is but a winter’s day; Some only breakfast and away; Others to dinner stay and are full fed; The oldest man but sups and goes to bed; He that goes soonest has the least to pay.”
