1. Birth & Migration

As I have said earlier, I was born in a district town called Sylhet (also known as Jalalabad by its old name) in Undivided India (later, East Pakistan and now Bangladesh). The city situated on the bank of river Surma had been a prominent Islamic spiritual Centre and home to numerous Sufi shrines. It was a wealthy district of Bengal Presidency in human and material resources in the early periods: a district that had delivered personalities of extraordinary geniuses from time to time.  It is here that one of the great leaders of the freedom movement Bipin Chandra Paul whose name is uttered with two other great sons of India, Lala Lajpat Rai and Balgangadhar Tilak, in the same breath as Lal Bal Pal, being a triumvirate of assertive nationalists in British-ruled India. The great litterateur, a multi-linguist and a man of exceptional ready wits, Sayed Mustaba Ali, was also a product of this district, born in its Karimganj subdivision. It is that Sylhet where Rabindranath Tagore had set foot in November 1919 (some months after denouncing his knighthood in protest against the Jallianwala Bagh massacre) and had written a poem 'Mamataheen Kalosrote' addressing Sylhet.  It is here, in Sylhet, that exists the mausoleums of fourteenth-century Sufi Shah Jalal and Shah Farhan, on the one hand, and the five hundred years old temple and the ancestral house of Sri Chaitanya, on the other. It was again this Sylhet that the great Berber Maghrebi scholar and explorer Ibn Battuta had come to visit while he had been to India. A great many things about the then Sylhet can be learnt from Ibn Battuta's Arabic Travelogue 'The Rihla'. 

[I vaguely remember I once visited the Dargah of Shah Jalal with my mother in my early childhood, and that had remained dormant in my memory. Later, in December 2019, when I revisited my homeland, I had again been to the Darga. But the Darga I saw then had no resemblance to what had remained in my mind. Such changes are, however, inevitable with time.]

As to its material resources, Sylhet was again a wealthy district of the Bengal Presidency, rich in tea gardens, rain forests, and river valleys. Besides tea, Sylhet used to grow large quantities of fruits, vegetables, and cereals. Among the fruits, the important ones were oranges,  bananas, pineapples, cucumbers, etc.  There used to be gambling with oranges as stakes at a place called Chhatak in the Sumamganj subdivision of Sylhet district. I remember to have seen my father coming with lots of oranges won in such games, in my early childhood. Oranges of Sylhet were of superior quality and very sweet to taste. It is on record that 135213 Maunds of oranges were exported from Sylhet in 1906. Varieties of superior quality bananas named Amritsagar, Dingamanik, Safri, Martaman, etc. used to grow in Sylhet.  Jum cultivation, too, was in practice in Sylhet. Maize, Cotton, Cucumber, Chinar, Pumpkin, Gourd, etc., used to be cultivated in Jum. Pumpkin and Gourd grown by Jum cultivation were very tasty. Sylhet was rich in forest produce, too.  

Timber woods also used to grow in abundance in the district. Description of the export of timber wood to foreign countries during the reign of Akbar is found in old records.  Being rich in quality woods, Sylhet also had the expertise in making battleships. It is learnt the district had to pay revenue to the king of Laur in terms of battleships. 

I am proud to have been born in such an illustrious city, which again, has been the headquarters of a great district.

However, as ill luck could have it, the British Government gave away such a resource-rich district to erstwhile East Pakistan by means of a questionable referendum held in haste. Some then-prominent political leaders of Assam also played a part. As a result, we had lost our ancestral home and financial stability, and our married sisters who had well-to-do landowning families in the rural areas of the Sylhet division became almost paupers. We thus lost our roots and became refugees. 

To know about the loss of our homeland, Sylhet and the emergence of a de-territorialized Sylheti identity in India click here. or go to the sub-page "A brief History of the annexation of Sylhet, etc.," available by expanding the menu Birth & Migration in the Navigation Bar.

While going to tell about my birth and lineage, I may state, that I didn’t know the exact date of my birth until I had created my first website (2007-08). My age was recorded in the Matriculation Certificate as 17 years 1 month on the first day of March, 19602. Based on this fact, and a declaration on the exact date of birth made by me, the Govt later fixed my official date of birth as Feb 5, 1943. The date was arbitrary and suddenly occurred to my mind when I was drafting the declaration. I could not be at rest without knowing my actual date of birth. I tried to recapitulate what my mother used to say about this when I was growing up.

It was the new moon night. The Second World War was continuing. It was pitch dark all around under the combined effect of the new moon and the blackout. My eldest maternal uncle’s marriage was to be solemnized that night, and he was getting ready to start for his marriage venue. At that time, my mother’s labour pain got hold of her. Mother was taken to Sylhet Sadar Hospital where she was interned. I was born shortly afterwards in the foggy darkness. These were the words I had heard from my mother. She said, it was a Thursday, and the date, according to the Bengali Calendar, was the 22nd Magh. She could not tell the year and the time. After much effort, I got hold of an old English-Bengali combined calendar of 1943, which I surmised had been the year of my birth, after consulting the calendars of 1945 & 1946, But that Calendar showed 22nd Magh had been a Friday. Thus, there was an anomaly in the date and the day of my birth arising from the data my mother gave. If it had been a Thursday, the corresponding date of the related year should have been the 4th of February (21 Magh), and if it had been the 22nd Magh, the day should have been Friday and not Thursday. The time of birth being unknown, this anomaly could not be resolved. Analyzing the facts and the data my mother gave, I conjectured that my birth might have been after midnight of 4-5 February which in effect would be 5th of February 1943 and that has, by chance, become my official date of birth. It was very probable as my mother, being illiterate, had no idea that, by international norms, the day changes after midnight.  However, keeping the day of birth mentioned by my mother in view,  the 4th of  February is observed as my date of birth in family matters.

My father was Sarada Charan Das and my mother was Sarojnalini Devi (nick-named Khuki). They had four sons and four daughters of whom I was the youngest. Four of my brothers and sisters died at a very young age. For details of my brothers and sisters click here.

Like my mother, my father too did not have much education. He was a non-Metric. He was initially a contractor but, later worked as a Manager of a printing press. Our ancestral home, an unfinished pucca building with a considerable expanse of vacant area,  was at a place called Rainagar in Sylhet town. It was situated on a tila (hillock). As I remember, we had a big pond in the front of our house on the flat land at the base of the hillock on which situated the house, and an orchard of fruits and other kinds of trees in the backyard.

Our Jhetamosai (father's elder brother) lived in a cottage within its premises.

[During my recent visit to Homeland Sylhet (Dec 2019), the once in a lifetime so far, I had been to the locality where I had spent some years of my early childhood after my birth. The area had undergone a metamorphic change. The tila (hillock) on which our house had stood and those on both sides of it with similar houses on them were all gone except the one standing opposite Rainagar Rajbari. Those tilas were now plain lands, marginally inclined here and there, with buildings standing on them. The pond that we had at the base of our tila could not be found anywhere around. According to local information, the pond had been filled up long back and buildings had been constructed there. I did not have the holding number and other related particulars of our ancestral house with me. I could not, therefore, find out the exact location where our ancestral home had once been, in spite of my best efforts. I had to return satisfied with the feeling that I could at least set foot on the soil, I had once trod on in my early childhood. I have included a separate chapter on my homeland visit in this memoir to give some highlights of my beloved birthplace.] (added June 20, 2020)

My paternal grandfather was Dinanath Das and my great grandfather was Brojanath Das. I did not have the opportunity to see either of them. Nor do I have any information on them. I didn’t also see my paternal grandmother and don’t even know her name. My father had two brothers – the elder Baroda Charan Das and the younger Basanta Das. He also had a sister Bharati Das.  I remember to have seen only the elder brother of my father. That uncle of mine (Jetha) was a widower and had a partnership shop with one of his friends. Possibly, he was addicted to alcohol, though my father never drank. He suddenly died one night in the wee hours at our ancestral home after he returned from his workplace. My father was away at that time. My brother did the last rites of my uncle before consigning the body to flames. I don’t know anything about my father’s younger brother or his sister. I came to know of their names from my elder sister. My sister, too, did not have information about them other than their names.

There was nobody on our paternal side to whom we were close. Father's elder brother (জেঠামশায়) was a widower and had no children. Though living on the same premises, he remained busy with work; we met sparsely. I, and maybe my brother and sisters, did not know where my other paternal uncle and his sister lived or whom they had in their families. I have no knowledge whatsoever to explain this. I do not remember to have ever seen any of them. In such circumstances, there obviously, did not develop any bond with our paternal side. We became inclined to our maternal side. 

We had our maternal house in the same town Sylhet in a locality called "Dariapara". My maternal grandfather was Ramesh Chandra Das, whom I had seen. He was very fond of the cows he kept at home, and would not have his meal without first feeding the cows.  It seems like he may have been involved in the business of selling milk. 

He had two marriages; my mother and her two brothers were from the first marriage. I did not see my maternal grandmother. She had died when my mother was very young. It was my mother, who had brought up her two siblings with the care of a mother. My mother had a few half-brothers and a half-sister. All these brothers and sisters maintained a cordial relation amongst themselves and had a mutual love for one another. My mother also had several cousins. All the brothers, sisters and cousins had great love and regard for my mother.

 Thus, on our maternal side, we had many uncles, some of whom I saw and distinctly remember. We were much attached to our maternal side as we had practically none on the paternal side. For details of my maternal uncles and cousins click here.

We left our ancestral place just after the partition, maybe by the end of 1947, (immediately following the referendum 4  on the annexation of Sylhet) when my father migrated to India taking the job of the Manager of a Printing Press at Silchar, Assam. 

The press belonged to one Satindra Mohan Dev[6], the father of the Congress leader of the other day, Santosh Mohan Dev – a one-time MP and a Central Minister from Assam. 

We were four in the family at that time viz., father, mother, my elder brother, and me. My brother had, however, stayed back in the maternal house in Sylhet to appear at his Matriculation Examination from Dacca University. He later joined us in India.

As we migrated, we became refugees and lost the affluence we had in the family earlier. Our property in land and house were left behind in Sylhet as it is. Later, these were treated as enemy property by the Govt. of Pakistan. I learnt from my cousins, who lived in Sylhet that our said property in land and building had been occupied by the Muslims who had built new buildings there.

AT Silchar, we stayed in a small rented house in an alley opposite the Railway Station in a locality called, Tarapur. My mother used to do all household chores by herself. I was little over four years at that time and was admitted to Class B (equivalent to present-day KG II) in a neighbourhood school (possibly run by the municipality) just opposite our house. 

I don’t have much of a memory of Silchar. My only memories relate to the nightmarish days we spent there when frightening reports of atrocities against and massacres of thousands of Hindus in East Pakistan reached us every day during the early part of our stay. Once, during that period, I overheard my parents talking about an incident where all the Hindus in a train were reportedly killed on the bridge over the river Bhairab[7]. 

People fleeing in fear of life and honour, who could make it to this side of the border brought with them reports of odious incidents of murders, rapes and other forms of atrocities every day. 

Our sisters and maternal uncles had stayed back with their families in East Pakistan; the reports of these horrifying incidents added to our worries and anxieties for them.  In the long run, none of our relations was, however, physically harmed, though most of them had to flee for life, leaving behind everything they had.

My father did not stay in Silchar for long. After the turmoil of the partition was over, possibly in mid-1949, he shifted to Jorhat in the Upper Assam. He again had the job of a Manager at a modest salary in a local Printing Press under the management of a Departmental Store named, “Doss & Co.” there. Incidentally, "Doss & Co" was the first departmental store in the North-East. To know more about it, click the link provided as " OK North North-East"  in the third box below:

I spent the whole of my childhood and the early youth in Jorhat. I still cherish my memories of those years. I love to visit the place even at this late stage and make opportunities to do it.

My father couldn’t acquire any land or house of his own, and we always stayed in rented houses in Jorhat. In fact, we did not have any house of our own since we had left our ancestral home in Sylhet till my brother acquired a house of his own in Silchar in the late 1970s, and still, later, I managed to acquire a flat on co-operative ownership at Salt Lake, Kolkata in the mid-1990s. But those are different stories and will find a place elsewhere.