Apnar Bari Kothai?

I regularly visit the coastal regions of Bangladesh for work. Whenever I meet a family, like in every other place in Bangladesh, the first personal question I am asked is: apnar bari kothai (where is your home)?

My standard, first response to the question is Dhaka. This is usually met by a curious look, because very few people are really from Dhaka. Dhaka is a city of migrants, many of whom have lived here for generations, but have never owned it. For most, it is a city to be at, not a place to be from.

So I have to explicate with: I live in Dhaka now, but our family is really from Habiganj, Sylhet.

This answer is met with: Oh! So do you visit Sylhet? How is your village?.

I don’t know. We lost everything to the river.

This earns me instant empathy. They take me in as one of them — a migrant soul detached from her roots, a survivor of our changing homeland. Then they want to tell me more about themselves because they feel a kind of kinship.

But I am not sure how similar our migrant experiences really are. Our home in Habiganj was washed away by the river even before I was born. I was born uprooted. Most of the people I meet at the coast are uprooted in the near past, some are being uprooted in the very present.

Apnar bari kothai?

That’s one of the first questions Bangladeshis tend to ask each other at the first meeting. You could be in the middle of a business meeting in Dhaka, a courtyard meeting at some remote village in the coast, a posh drawing room in Delhi, London or Washington, or just on cyberspace. But you can bet on this being among the first questions.

When they ask this, they don’t mean to ask where you live now. Like most overcrowded, growing-at-a-pace-faster-than-we-can-keep-up-with population, Bangladeshis are shifting — transitioning between our imagined homelands and our migrant realities. So when they ask about ‘home’, they mean the root. We want to know where it all began.

I’ve often wondered why. Why do we care where our roots lie, when we are branched so far from it? Why do we care where it all began when we know that we can never go back to it?

Salman Rushdie compares migrant people with translated work. When we marvel at the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, do we appreciate the Persian genius, or his translators into English or Bangla? Similarly, Rushdie asks us migrant people to celebrate our transplanted, chutneyfied self.

People I meet often ask me if I speak the Sylheti dialect. I don’t. This is not commonly spoken in Dhaka, and I speak the chutneyfied dialect of the city. Maybe I should follow what Rushdie suggests.

But any celebration can only be done by those for whom the uprooting was a matter of choice. The children born to families losing lives and livelihoods to floods, cyclones, river erosions and all the other ancillaries that is climate change, what choices will they have? These children will not remember what home looked like.
When I meet children at the coast, children who have been forced to leave their homes, which has its own socio-cultural milieu, I think that someday, they'll end up like me, where Khulna - faissha fish - pot gaan will only exist for them in the stories their parents will tell them about the good old days.

This December, the mighty and powerful, and their hangers on, will meet in Copenhagen to discuss the future of the planet. There will be a lot negotiation, based on complicated modeling, on who will pay whom how much for cutting what amount of emissions for over how long. Somber sounding communiqués will be issued. Pundits will parse every single word of that document.

Will anyone think about the children who will not know how to answer apnar bari kothai?

The One Art That I've Mastered

"The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

---Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster."

-- Elizabeth Bishop

Indeed, indeed, indeed, indeed. If there is this one art like that I have mustered up the courage to master, it is the art of loosing. The art of loosing voluntarily, the art of giving up, the art of not looking back upon the things I lost, the people I left behind and the art of loosing parts of me, which at some point had seem integral, but now no longer seem to matter.

After much ado about fulfilling every minute with 60 seconds worth of distance run--ala Kipling-- I have finally mastered the art of loosing hours everyday to wakefulness and lapses in memory and blanket confusion.

Loosing no longer seems like a harsh word or defeat. It's more of a coping mechanism.I've lost my obsession for perfection, I'm lost the ability to rest and I've lost the will to do anything about correcting these loses. And for once, I feel free. I also feel proud because I've finally mastered the art of loosing, without feeling shame.