Then we met again. Turning round and round the pages of history we met. This was our common destiny which like destination always remains blur beyond the horizon. I met him through a professor I knew for long. He was from Australia I heard, pursuing his Phd on Bangla cinema. However I hardly expected him to be a Bengali. But the professor smiled at me and said ‘I hope it will not be a problem for you to help him to collect his research materials, particularly when he knows Bangla and you will be able to communicate with him in you own language’. Surely it wouldn’t have been a problem for me in case he had no knowledge of my language but was I relieved to know that piece of information or did it make a difference? It did when I got to know he is a Bangladeshi. He was the second Bangladeshi I met or may be the third (as suddenly now I remember my ‘desh’ supposed to be somewhere called Bikrampur so may be I am the first one!). So we met and explored the city, ate at several places and took loads of photos and videos. He felt uncomfortable when people leered at him on the streets. He was a Bengali come on – he is not different, nothing so special which makes you ogle! There must have been an air of a tourist or ‘foreigner’ in him which people could intuitively make out in spite of his language. Did he speak the same Bangla? Yes, not with any accent we generally point out as ‘Bangal’ – dialect(s) typical of Bangladeshis. How did we know how a Bangladeshi speaks? It is from the way still people who moved to this side of the border during the ‘long partition’ – an event which started after the division of Bengal and still continues - which the state would like to refer as infiltration. We call them Bangal here which means people who are originally from Eastern part of Bengal – currently the Bangladesh. He spoke in a neutral accent but used some variations. He called water ‘pani’ instead of ‘jal’- the way we call it here. But ‘pani’ is used in hindi and other Indian languages. He was as urban as me and one thing common to us is that we communicated in English very well constantly shifting and switching between two tongues. I was happily surprised to find we had more than one common interest – literature, film, politics, Naxalbari revolution and Partition of India. He came to Kolkata to collect his research materials and books. College Street disappointed him. Nor that other places and libraries gave him much hope. I felt ashamed. But why should I. This is our common history – the same fate we share. At least they were lucky to have a nation defined by language. He found very few DVD’s of Bangla films he was looking for. I realized here, in the so-called cultural capital of Bengal nobody has bothered to preserve copies of films by some of the stalwart Bengali film makers like Mrinal Sen or Buddhadeb Dasgupta. Satyajit Ray is spared from this humiliation as at least he in his death-bed managed to brag the Oscar. Alas people here now at last out with criticisms of Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire getting this much valued and longed for prize (the name of which however became known to many Bengali’s after Ray got it) the director being an ‘outsider’ selling the poverty of India. Lets again from both sides of the border remember our cult poet Mr. Tagore – ‘One who is not conscious of his wealth is poor’. The poverty of our world’s became apparent as he kept speaking English to everyone – even to any common shop-keeper or road-sider. Suddenly a man smiled and retorted back sweetly, “you are from Bangladesh, a Bangali, aha! Why then you keep speaking English. I was confused initially…” He kept quiet. He didn’t speak for a while. Later I got to know he was ashamed. But reality remains that the power of English still holds strong among any commoner of this subcontinent– you ought to be treated like a Sahib if you use that surrogate tongue of yours. Whose shame is this? No his, not mine, not there’s but ours. We have formed a collectivity of shame – a community. But certainly some people are insensitive enough to be absolutely shameless. They are the fence-sitters who would oil your machine for free when you ride and would ask money for the same the moment you are out of the driver’s seat. We went to interview a well-known playwright and upstart film-maker. Knowing that my friend was on a fellowship from Australia he said “you get money for your work, and then would you pay me?” I thought why the earth doesn’t split so that I hide inside in shame. This shows the real nature of our cormorant intellectuals sitting with half-closed eyes waiting for the right opportunity. West Bengal’s new intellectual Brigade is warming up; beware before they run over you! I got to know a lot of things in few days, not about him, but about myself, about my culture – our culture. With him for the first time I visited the Park Street Cemetery, climbed strange old staircases to get inside old houses of British architecture. Layers of histories waiting for us to decipher – we are too lazy to do that. Days passed, eating in food joints, taking pics of old Kolkata it was time for him to leave. I promised to send him some of the films he was looking for getting hold of them through some of my sources. But I failed to get hold of them with the best of my efforts. I am ashamed once more, for myself, for us. Will he ever come back? He has to, he must! Our destinies take us where we go. Our destinies are in our birth. Destinies are destinations. Like a criminal we ride the bus of our past to return to the site where the crime was committed. We have a common past which connects as much as it disconnects. He went away. Someone returned. My first Bangladeshi friend was someone who came as an international student to India to do his research training program. I was auditing a part of that course and I met him there. He initially came with a tourist visa and went back to his country for a while before the festivals of October in Bengal when institutions remain closed. Then when classes resumed I heard he was not getting a student visa because of certain official hazards. It has been long I gave up hope. I felt sorry he couldn’t return. Then suddenly I received a call from his Indian mobile number. It was a happy surprise to know he managed to get his much awaited visa out of the knots of bureaucracy. One day when we were talking he said that from the place in Bangladesh where he stays it should take not more than three hours to reach Kolkata but it took more than a day to reach here by train because of security checking and other border-crossing protocols. Such is the distance between us – such is the unbridgeable gaps of history which connects us through distance. We remain shut and fret between the drama of coming and going. I, he, we – all of us don’t have a name, we are histories, we are loving faces who can recognize each other and smile from two sides of the same world.
