Outsider: inside story

While Bihar never accepted us, Jharkhand almost wants to throw us out. More than half the state is in favour of the domicile “motion”. However this does not mean we can call Bengal home either. Our relatives there only accept us as “guests”. I was denied admission into Kolkata colleges because I studied in Hindi medium schools. Did anybody say Hindi is India’s official language?

After graduating in Bihar, I went to Orissa to study journalism at the Indian Institute of Mass Communications, Dhankanal. A nice little place it was, surrounded by green hills. But we were aliens. Western clothes, English speaking and some of us even smoked. All this alienated us from the crowd effortlessly. The next destination was Chandigarh, where I went to work as a journalist. If I was “smart and advanced” for Dhenkanal, I was “shabby and backward” here. In any case, Panjab University doesn’t enrol students willing to do a Masters if they hold a degree from Bihar.

I am married now, and have another place on my list where I am an outsider: Kerala. I am married to a Malayali. His family has accepted me with open hearts, but there is something that tells me that I don’t quite belong there either. Maybe it’s the language and my inability to converse with those who don’t speak English or Hindi. When my husband says he wants to settle down somewhere near his own place, I feel a sense of loss. For I don’t have a place I can call my own; a place that calls me back.

Maybe the genesis of my problem lies in the partition of Bengal. We are Indians hailing from what became East Pakistan and then Bangladesh. So where do we go? Well, we may go anywhere, but there’s no place we can call home.