Liberation

by Taher Sethwala (India)

I didn't expect to find India

What has always awed me about traveling is how everything new and astonishing to me is too mundane for someone else. Mountains I marvel at, could be scenery of someone's window. Trudging walks on narrow muddy trails could be someone's routine, for accessing clean water. Clothing I save for special occasions are worn to rags by someone every day. Perhaps the urge to understand each other, despite this divide, is what keeps us turning to our backpacks. A solo trip to Assam has what really sparked these thoughts in my mind. You never visit a place with a blank slate, do you? Boarding that train that June morning, all I could see was spotless skies, a lonesome boat on a river, and tea farms stretching to the horizon. And I kept seeing it till I reached Guwahati, and even as I started our tourist hotspot expedition. And Assam did not disappoint. Roads snaked between hills. Boat rides to nowhere and back, a grey speck in Kaziranga that could have been a rhino or a rock, but I'll believe it was the former. People clothed in primary colors roamed plantations that never seemed to end. And yet the tea tasted the same. Just like tacos to Mexicans and pizzas to Italians. It was really just a celestial bend of water, milk and some leaves. I drank my first tea of Assam on a small roadside stall, which was no less than Starbucks in those tacit , steep valleys. The owner of the stall was a effusive , tourist friendly person, his name was Rahim. He asked me about the spots i was going to visit next and was generous enough to give me advance instructions about those places. In our polite “Tea talks” he told me how he came to Assam during the separation of east Pakistan, which is now Bangladesh. “We were in chaos and so was the nation. I was ten, back then. The cacophony of the weapons of war surrounded us, and were sounds that has haunted me too early in life, and they still do. My father worked as a labourer in someone’s fields he was a clueless simple man with responsibility of a wife, two kids and two cows. He could not process the future consequences of the liberation war, which we seemed to be losing. Autocracy once again seemed to transcend democracy. My parents had to decide at which side they were going to raise me and my sister. So like many other panicked villagers they broke out to the other side of the border , in the middle of the night. Not in Pakistan not in Bangladesh but in India.” “So do you ever think of going back to your village in Bangladesh?” I asked With a satisfactory grin and eyes wide in gratitude he replied. “Assam has always provided us more than what we had ever looked for in the liberation movement. I have spent more than half of the hourglass of my life here and l owe it to the place and its tourists. I vote in the local elections ,this place has absorbed us and we belong here.” Rahim’s story had kept me occupied to the last sip of my tea , Its not very often that privileged people like me, get to hear a refugees side of the story. We know about the war from history textbooks which speak a lot about the countries into the war their allies and enemies. The leaders who wage the war and the generals who lead it. But somewhere in the midst of these gigantic historical events, tales of thousands of people like Rahim fall to the bottom of the abyss. Rahim looked at me all serious in introspection and tried to feather the conversation, he complained about how he ran out of milk too often and had to resort to powdered milk to keep his little stall running. I smiled at him and paid money and gratitude for my tea. And took a bus for a renowned local market “Fancy Bazar” to buy some local handicrafts. I heard broken hindi everywhere in local buses where people hummed Bollywood songs in narrow streets of markets. I stopped to have local snacks in a small cafe near the market. Where all i could see were posters of Amitabh Bacchan on walls, not much different from home.