Exchange of enclaves: 95-year-old finally finds a home she can call her own

She is also one of the oldest. “I have been in India before. I lost my vision a few years ago… maybe five years ago. Before that I had walked to Kamakhya temple in Assam. At that time I wasn’t an Indian, neither was I a Bangladeshi. We were hanging somewhere in the middle,” she remembers.

Now, she spends most her days indoors, seated on a mattress on the floor. “You know, when I was very young… this was all (part) of India and everyone was fighting for their country. Suddenly, I was told that we were free of the angrez (English) rule and that we were Indians staying in Pakistan. Then after 1971, we were Indians living in Bangladesh. Now, finally, we are Indians living in India. The land never changed, neither did we. But everything else kept changing,” she says.

Amartya’s story isn’t uncommon. Neither is it surprising for those who had lived in the Indo-Bangladesh enclaves or chhitmahals, which had remained marooned from political boundaries. All this ended on June 6, 2015 when the Land Boundary Agreement was ratified between India and Bangladesh and the enclaves were exchanged at midnight on July 31.

The decision has left the 95-year-old grasping at the tin walls of her home, listening curiously at the swishing of the electric fan above her — a first for her. “I wish I could see where I am. I am here with my two sons and they’re busy with paper work. But I know I have come home and it pains me to not be able to see,” she says. After a brief pause, she asks her younger son, Kartik — “Is it very different from Bangladesh?”

The lush green fields on both sides of the border, punctuated with rivers and lakes, seem almost identical, Kartik tells his mother. After a pause, he adds, “Now, we will start existing. Earlier, our lives weren’t important. We were like shadows. My mother lost her vision because the doctors couldn’t register her as a patient since we lived in an enclave.”