Book on displaced Chinese-origin people sets stage for reunion of friends after 48 yrs

Sixty-year-old Alam Wang did not want to recall her childhood days spent in Makum,a small town near Tinsukia in Upper Assam,until she met Kaushalya Barua....

Sixty-year-old Alam Wang did not want to recall her childhood days spent in Makum,a small town near Tinsukia in Upper Assam,until she met Kaushalya Barua,her childhood playmate here last week. Alam and Kaushalya met after 48 years the first time after being separated by the Chinese aggression of 1962.

I recall how we were huddled together into a bus and taken away first to Dibrugarh jail and then to Nagaon jail when the war broke out,all because we had some Chinese origin, said Alan. I am an Assamese of Chinese origin.

It was such a pleasant surprise to meet my long lost friend, said Kaushalya Barua,who recently retired as principal of Gangabhushan Chokhani Girls School at Makum. This reunion takes me back to my lost childhood. I remember how we went to school together,played together,heard stories from our grandmother under the moonlit sky.

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Kaushalya vividly remembers those days when the police used to pick up people of Chinese origin. There were several of them in our school. I dont know where they are. I hope all of them are alive and well, she said.

Alan was a Class VI student when her family was whisked away by the police and dumped in jail. I later learnt that my uncles were sent to China. One of my aunts,an Assamese from Sivasagar,had come here from abroad a few years back to trace her roots. She also came to our house at Gohpur, Alan said.

While all the male members of Alans family were packed off to China,she and several others were left behind. As the war ended,these people started coming back home only to find that their houses had been confiscated as enemy property and sold off in an auction. I came out of jail three years later and finally settled down in Gohpur in northern Assam, said Alan.

Both Alan and Kaushalya were pleasantly surprised as they learnt that both were still alive and were,in fact,sitting in the same crowd when author Rita Choudhury called them to the stage. It was touching to see tears roll down Mas cheeks when she met her childhood friend after such a long gap, said Mailen Tham,Alans daughter,who is a doctor in Guwahati.

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The occasion of their reunion was the release of Makam,a novel by noted Assamese writer and Sahitya Akademi award winner Rita Choudhury. Makam (meaning golden horse in Chinese) is a novel woven around the multiple tragedies that a large number of people of Chinese origin underwent in the past two centuries.

I have tried to tell the story through Lailin whose ancestors had suffered hunger in China during the turn of the 19th century and landed in Assam when the British discovered tea here, said Choudhury,who teaches Political Science in Cotton College here.