My grandfather could not cross a line drawn on the ground.
I have written that easily; the thing itself was not easy. He would step over a rope. Over a bamboo. The ridge of a field, earth turned by the plough, a plank bridge — all of it he crossed. What stopped him was only a thin line drawn by a human hand. A chalk line, a charcoal line, a line scratched in the dust with the end of a stick. In front of one of those his feet would halt. He would look at it a while, then go round. In seventy-five years of life he never once stepped over a line.
We found it funny, of course, but he stayed perfectly calm. He would say, You don’t know lines, that’s why you’re not afraid of them. I know them.
He has been gone four years. I am an amin now, a land surveyor. A small office in Kurigram town — chain, tape, pegs, plans. I measure people’s land, divide it, draw lines. Drawing lines is my trade; lines are my rice.
And last Tuesday something happened to me. It is to tell that that I have sat down to write this so late at night. But let it keep till the end. Everything has an order. First the lines.
I was eight. My cousin Milon, out of mischief, drew a chalk circle round my grandfather’s low stool one day. Grandfather was sitting on it smoking, and did not notice. When he got up for the Asr prayer his eye fell on the line. He stayed where he was.
The call to Maghrib came. Grandfather still sitting. Grandmother, looking for him, came out into the yard and understood at one glance. She wiped the line away with the end of her sari and gave Milon two blows across the back. Grandfather was still calm. He called Milon over and stroked his head and said, It’s not your fault, boy. It’s the line’s fault. Whenever a line finds a man it wants to trap him. That’s its nature.
Sitting down to eat that night I asked, Dada, what happens if you cross a line?
He ran his fingers through the rice on his plate a long time. Then, in a low voice, he said, They shoot you.
I stared at him. At eight years old, the word shoot sounds as unreal as the ogres in fairy tales.
He was still grave.
My grandfather’s name was Jamir Uddin. There is jomi, land, in the name, people used to say. The munshi at the market corrected them once: in Arabic, jamir means conscience, the heart. Whichever you take, neither of the two came to him by any straight road. He had land and no deed. He had a conscience and it had no price.
He was born in the month of Shrabon, nineteen forty-seven, in Dasiarchhara. Do you know it? Inside the belly of Phulbari upazila in Kurigram, one of the largest Indian enclaves. Let me explain a little, because without the explanation the rest of this will not stand up.
Bangladesh all round. In the middle, an island of several thousand bighas which on paper is India. No barbed wire, no pillars, no BSF, no BGB. The line of the border existed only on the map. On the ground there was no trace of it at all. Which yard was in which country, which betel-nut tree in which state, only the elders knew. By word of mouth, father to son.
And in the very season of my grandfather’s birth, a gentleman sitting in Delhi was running a pen across a map.
The gentleman’s name was Cyril Radcliffe. A barrister from England. It was the first time in his life he had set foot in India, and he had all of five weeks. Not one of the districts he was cutting had he seen with his own eyes. Working from old maps and census registers he drew a few long lines across the foreheads of crores of people. When the work was done he went home and never came back this way again. He did not even take his fee. Why he did not, he never answered. It is only said that before leaving he burned all his papers.
If the man drawing the line burns his own papers and runs, then you can see what a line is. Not my words. My grandfather’s.
Their line, of course, was older than Radcliffe. The history books say the enclaves were born out of the accounting of wars and treaties between the Maharaja of Cooch Behar and the faujdar of Rangpur in Mughal times. In people’s mouths there is another story. The Maharaja and the faujdar used to play cards and dice, and stake whole villages. Whichever side lost, the village changed hands. God knows the truth of it. I only think, now and then, that three hundred years ago at some gathering a piece slipped from a gambler’s hand, and under that piece my grandfather’s whole life was buried.
In forty-seven those old playing-houses became foreign countries overnight. The final reckoning was a hundred and eleven Indian enclaves inside Bangladesh and fifty-one Bangladeshi ones inside India. The strangest thing among them was in Panchagarh. A patch of jute field. The field was India. The land all round the field was Bangladesh. That land was itself inside an Indian enclave, and that enclave was inside Bangladesh. There is only one such thing on earth. The field belonged to a Bangladeshi farmer. He went out from his own yard in the morning, crossed three international borders on paper, and got to his field to weed it. On the ground, of course, there was nothing.
Only a footpath.
No line on the ground, and yet the line was everywhere in life. No school inside the enclave, no hospital, no electricity, no police station. India existed only in name, and even the name could not be spoken aloud.
My father was enrolled at school under a false address. Not only the address. In the register his father’s name was written as Hashem Munshi — a distant cousin of my grandfather’s, a Bangladeshi. Do you understand? On his own son’s papers there was no way to get my grandfather’s own name entered. He showed me that admission receipt once. Kept carefully in a tin box, a paper gone yellow along the folds. Showing it he said, On this paper my son is another man’s son. On this paper I don’t exist. Understand? A line doesn’t only trap a man, brother. A line erases him too.
Once my grandmother had to be admitted to Phulbari hospital, at death’s door. Under a false name, a false address, and in the register, in the box for the husband, that same Hashem Munshi. Grandfather spent the whole night on the veranda. Every time he tried to go in there was the question — what relation are you to the patient? He had no way of giving a true answer. Beside his own wife’s fever he was nobody.
At night the thing was clearest of all. Electric lights in the villages all round, and in the middle a pitch-dark island. You did not need a map to see where a country was.
You could see it by the darkness.
I asked him straight out one day. I had just got into college and had found the nerve. Dada, why don’t you cross a line? A line is only a stroke of ink.
He took a long pull on his tobacco. A stroke of ink? He laughed as though I had said a snake was a long piece of rope. Listen. A line is the greatest magic in the world. It needs no spell, no amulet, only one stroke. One stroke and the earth is two. One stroke and your brother is a foreigner, your uncle’s house is abroad, and a man sitting in his own yard is an infiltrator. And do you know the most frightening part? A line is a living thing. A line has hunger.
Hunger? I did not know whether to laugh. What does a line eat?
It eats people. He said it looking into the fire. My father used to say that of all the blood ever shed on this earth, half has gone into the belly of lines. An exaggeration, all right, I grant you. Now you reduce it. How much will you reduce it by?
I showed off my book learning. I talked about Korea, a thirty-eighth line drawn on a map that has kept brother from brother for seventy years. I talked about Berlin, where people refused to obey a line, so a whole wall had to be built on top of it. He listened carefully. Then he nodded. There you are. Lines are the same everywhere. Only the language is different.
Then, after a pause, he added, There are only three in this world that do not obey lines. Birds, rivers, and death. No map has ever yet stopped those three. And do you know how many countries a man has of his own? One. Three and a half cubits. You need no passport to enter that country, and nobody can ever throw anybody out of it.
At the time these seemed to me an old man’s philosophy. Pleasant to listen to; not believable.
Then in January of 2011, on this same Phulbari border of ours, a girl of fifteen hung on the barbed wire hour after hour. The photograph was printed in newspapers here and abroad. My grandfather did not eat properly for seven days. He only said, once, You see? Didn’t I tell you. The line eats.
In July of 2015 the enclaves were counted. Forms at every door. Which country do you wish to be a citizen of — tick. India, or Bangladesh.
At sixty-eight, for the first time in his life, my grandfather drew a line with his own hand. A small tick, in the Bangladesh box. Having drawn it he sat looking at the pen a long time. Then he asked the boy doing the count, Just writing it makes it so?
The boy laughed. Yes, chacha. Just writing it makes it so.
My grandfather nodded slowly. He muttered, So that’s the power of a pen.
His closest friend Asgar Ali ticked the other box. He would go to India. He would see with his own eyes, before dying, the country he had been born a citizen of. In November the bus left by way of Burimari. On the day of going the two old men stood a long time holding hands. Asgar Ali said, I’ll go and see the country, Jamir.
My grandfather said, You’ll see soil. A country lives on paper.
Some months later news came from over there. Asgar Ali was in a resettlement camp at Dinhata. He wrote in his letter that everything was here, only there was a wire fence round the camp. Jamir re, I see lines here too.
Nobody in Dasiarchhara will ever forget the night of the thirty-first of July. At one minute past twelve, sixty-eight years of waiting ended. People lit sixty-eight candles, one for each year of the darkness. Red and green went up on bamboo poles. Prayers at the mosque, ululation and conch shells at the temple. People crying and laughing, laughing and crying. I was twenty. I walked in the procession all night with a flag in my hand.
I came home at two. A hurricane lamp burning in the yard. My grandfather sitting on his low stool. Alone. Facing the dark.
You didn’t go to the celebration?
What celebration.
From today we’re Bangladesh.
He was quiet a long time. Then he said, When a man dies there’s a funeral prayer. There’s the fortieth day, there’s the kulkhani. When a country dies there are fireworks.
I sat down on the ground beside the stool. He was looking at the sky. The country I was born a citizen of, I never once laid eyes on in my life. Tonight it died. Not one man said a prayer for it. I’m wondering — does a country feel pain?
I said nothing. What was there to say.
Look at the ground, he said. The soil is what it always was. The water of the Dharla goes the way it always went. Only the paper has changed. And for that paper people cried sixty-eight years and tonight they’ll dance till morning. And after that you’ll tell me a country means soil? No, brother. Soil belongs to God. A country is a thing people made. And whatever people make, they make on paper.
He looked at the candles burning in the distance. They’ve lit sixty-eight lamps. Did you count? I’m sixty-eight too. I can’t work out whose birthday those lamps are for and whose kulkhani.
Everybody thought his affliction would be cured now. The line was gone, after all. Wiped off the map; in the records Dasiarchhara was now a village like any other village of Phulbari. Electricity came, a metalled road came, a school came. My father got a voter card, and on that card, in the box for the father’s name, my grandfather’s own name appeared for the first time in his life. My father brought the card and put it in his hands. My grandfather ran his finger over the name a long time. That day my middle-aged father cried like a child.
His feet, though, were not cured. In front of a chalk line he stopped as before. Only one thing changed. Before, there had been fear in his eyes at the sight of a line. Now there was the weariness of recognising an old enemy. One day I asked him, Dada, the line’s gone. Why do you still go round?
He said, Lines don’t go. Lines only change maps.
I learned the surveyor’s trade in 2017. Everybody assumed he would be hurt. The line that had held the man all his life, and his grandson takes up the job of drawing lines. He was not hurt. He only said, Learn it. Learn it properly. The man who draws the line and the man who obeys it are never the same man. Stay in the hand that draws. Don’t come down to the feet that obey.
Then, after a pause, he added, But remember one thing. A line is born in ink and lives on blood. And whatever line you draw will know you afterwards.
I did not understand what he meant that day.
I did not understand until last Tuesday.
He died in the Shrabon of 2022. The month he was born in, the season the line was born in. The night before he died he called me and put the tin box in my hands. He said, Keep it.
Three things in the box.
My father’s admission receipt, the paper on which my father is another man’s son. The slip from the count in 2015, with the only line my grandfather ever drew with his own hand, a small tick. And underneath everything, folded in four, an old greasy paper.
That paper is a map. Drawn by hand. A map of Dasiarchhara. His father drew it. Which house is where, which pond, which mosque, even the big koroi tree. Only one thing is missing.
The border.
On the map there is no line anywhere round Dasiarchhara. The village ends in the white emptiness of the paper.
My father used to say, my grandfather whispered, that once you draw a line it becomes true. He used to say, let there be a line on the government’s map, let it stay there. It won’t be on mine. If I can do nothing else, at least by my hand this won’t become true.
After the funeral prayer I stood in the graveyard watching them dig. The gravedigger first cut a rectangle in the ground with the edge of his spade, to the measure. Then he dug. The man who in seventy-five years had never crossed a single line, we lifted between us and lowered inside four lines.
He did not object. For the first time.
Putting the earth in, I remembered what he used to say. A man has only one country of his own. Three and a half cubits.
He had come home.
Now let me tell you about Tuesday.
People think my trade is measurement. In fact you could call it the trade of watching people. The face a man shows while land is being divided — if a man saw that face in a mirror he would break the mirror.
Tuesday’s job was in a village in Phulbari. Two brothers. Land left by their father, a compromise partition after twenty-two years of litigation. I measured, drove the pegs, ran the string. Along the line of the string the boundary was cut with a spade. The trouble came in one place. In the division, the parents’ graves fell in the elder brother’s share. The younger brother stood looking at the graves a long time. Then he said something I will not forget for a long time.
He said, The graves fall on your land. Take them. Mother’s yours too.
He said it and walked away. A spade-cut line separated a man from his mother’s grave. In front of my eyes. Along the string I had run.
In the evening I packed up my things and started back. The van was on the other side of the road. Between us, the line I myself had cut. Straight, fresh, a long stroke across the breast of the wet earth.
My feet stopped.
Believe me, I tried. My right foot would not lift. It seemed to me that the other side of the line was another country and that I had no papers. How long I stood there I do not know. In the end I did what my grandfather had done for seventy-five years. I went round. I walked to the peg where the line ended and crossed over there.
Getting into the van, at first I wanted to laugh.
You will say it was the strain of the day. That the business of the two brothers had pressed on my mind. It may be. A doctor in Rangpur, many years ago, examined my grandfather and said it was an obsessive disorder, curable with medicine. My grandmother used to say a line had got into him as a child, the way a jinn gets into a man. He himself used to say he simply knew lines.
Which do I believe? I don’t know. I only know that some things care nothing for belief or disbelief. They happen. That is all.
And if the whole of it seems to you a village tale, do this. Open the almirah in your house. Deeds, land records, khatians, birth certificate, marriage register, NID, passport. Your land, your marriage, your birth, even the fact that you are yourself — every proof of it is lying there on paper. People think the papers are theirs. And yet when there is a fire people save the papers first and everything else after. Work out for yourself who belongs to whom.
I could not sleep that night. I got the tin box down. There was no power; I lit a candle and spread my great-grandfather’s map on the bed. By candlelight I sat looking at the open, unfenced village.
I did not notice when my daughter woke and came and stood beside me. She is five. Her name is Nodi. River. I named her. My grandfather used to say there are three in this world that do not obey lines: birds, rivers and death. You cannot name a daughter after death. Pakhi, bird, was my grandmother’s name. That left the river.
Nodi looked at the map a long time. Then she asked the question that does not enter anybody’s head except at the age of five.
Baba, why is there no fence round the picture?
Before I could answer she picked up a pencil from the table. She would draw a line round the village. She would finish the picture.
I took her hand. As gently as I could.
Don’t draw it, my girl.
Why?
What answer was I to give? Four generations of history? Mr Radcliffe? Sixty-eight candles? That girl hanging on the barbed wire? I only told her what her great-great-grandfather had said.
Once you draw it, it becomes true.
Nodi looked at my face a while. Then she put the pencil down and went off to bed. I folded the map and put it back in the box.
There is only one difficulty.
My daughter is very stubborn.
And there is no shortage of pencils in this house.
