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?