He was crouching in the far corner of the outside wall of a mud hut. Two emaciated girls stood by his side, aged six and two. “Yes, I live here, these are mine. Yes, they go to school. What do they get to eat? Khichri, yes.” A hopelessly thin woman with fine features came and squatted on the dirt track. “My mother,” he said without looking in her direction.We were standing at the eastern edge of India. It was the southernmost tip of Tripura, a place called Sabrum. Across we could see the bunkers of Bangladesh Rifles. Between us and the border ran a river. Someone waved an arm. “Chittagong.” The arm was flung towards the hills on the other side. Looking through a pair of binoculars that appeared from somewhere, I saw a similar hut on the other side; there was a clothesline on which the laundry was drying. Even the print on the “other” lungi was the same as the one on “this” lungi: blue squares on a grey background.Words of the guide droned in the background. “These people are Tripuris; there are altogether 19 tribes in Tripura — Reangs, Mocs, Deb Burmans, Chakmas, Halams, Lusai. So many languages.”In the gentle wilderness of ungentle borders and boundaries, like an angry steel apparition stood the fence; Bangladesh and India’s “hudood” demarcated with an iron finality. The black steel angles were mounted on a brash concrete platform which ran the length holding the iron firmly in place.In between all this expensive installation, there was something that made me wonder whether to laugh or to cry. The fence had adhered to the 0-150 guideline, as agreed between BSF and BDR, that is, it was at least 150 metres space from the “zero” line. That is why it could not possibly include Sago Tripura’s little hut which was a few metres short of 150. So there it was bang in front of the steel angles, proudly standing on its own piece of land with its grass roof, bamboo support and mud-grass walls. Sago had watched the concrete being poured from giant mixers, the steel girders being hauled out of trucks. And he had a stroke of luck. He had been hired for a daily wage to clear the strip for concrete pouring. He had some money left over with which he planned to place a new grass roof on his hut. But hey! What was this? The fence came up as an awesome statement of steely finality. And he? He was left out. Plain and simple, left out not only from his village, his district but from India, Hindustan, Bharat. Just plain out. Pushed out of the borders of his own country by steel and concrete, he had no neighbours, no friends, no animals, no birds. All he saw ahead was a row of bunkers. Behind them he sometimes caught a movement, a flash of metal. Perhaps the Bangladesh Rifles were cleaning and polishing their guns.Sago was scared — he ran around in a mad frenzy. He tried to stop the workers from fixing the steel on the concrete. But they just laughed. So Sago gave up. Clutching his wage in his fist, he went with them to the Desi Dukan for a peg or two to divert his confused mind.At night when he returned home, he parted with his happily sozzled friends. He dragged himself over the half-complete steel girders to his forlorn and soulful hut standing alone in no man’s land. Left right out.
