IDENTITY

I opened my eyes. The left one felt skin obstructing its opening. The right one opened up to a sight of nostrils; beautiful, pale, white nostrils. But it took me both 5 minutes and a year to make sense of this sight.

The flooded banks of the mighty Brahmaputra had brought me, or us, asunder onto a remote bank. My head was resting on a woman's belly. She was motionless, just like I was 5 minutes ago. I sat up. On my other side I could see and hear the river in full spate. Hut material, animal carcass and endless stream of branches and twigs drifted past as a stream within a stream.

I tried hard to make sense of the sight around. The moment I realised I had leaned on a woman, I jerked myself on my feet and away from her. I looked around. Not a soul. Only nature made sound. I pushed myself for answers towards the woman. She was dead... 

Three months ago an Indian journalist had landed at the Guwahati International Airport. Next to him on the same flight was an anxious Middle-Eastern woman. She drifted past the airport trivialities and dashed out of the airport. The journalist followed this development out of the corner of his eye. Then he went his way.

The streets of Guwahati seemed a world apart from the places he further visited. Assam state, it seemed, was made up of dead bodies of humans and beasts. Some charred by rioting and the remaining ones bloated by heavy floods.

As he moved into the interiors of this geography, he closed on to the exteriors of the country. He saw more of everything that no one would ever want to see. He knew that the 'so called' border between India and Bangladesh is home to some of the most poor, vulnerable and densest population in the world. It drifts and shifts with the river flow. And as the border shifts so do human minds, outlooks and fates. Same lifestyle, same clothes, same language, same problems but people lunge to kill. All because of that disguised beast - IDENTITY. 

One day the river belongs to Muslims; next day the Hindus. One day the alluvial tract is India's, the next day it is Bangladeshi. As nature made river change course, so did human interpretation and response.

The Middle-Eastern looking woman was a Bangladeshi, travelling on an Indian passport. She had both. Maddened with hope and despair, she had come to recover her children and confirm the fate of her family, her entire village. Her only identity she cared about. Just across a fluctuation in wilderness yet unreachable. Her home yesterday but an alien country now.

The journalist, a Delhi guy, was Indian. Or so he thought. Riots for claiming space in a land where space was claimed only by nature changed the lady's fate and his identity. During his coverage, he took a blow on the head and when he regained consciousness he was straddling a dead woman. The same Middle-Easterner from his earlier memory of her. A memory, he had lost.

She was back in her native village, maybe in mind when she was alive, and definitely in body now that she was dead, regardless of the country.

Now, I fish for living. When asked, I am taught by fellow humans to tell my name as Sadat (Truth). They say I am in Bangladesh, a Bangladeshi. My documented identity - the Indian one, lies at the bottom of Brahmaputra or perhaps the Indian Ocean.

Or maybe, I am Sadat.