SURVIVAL BEYOND FRACTURED FENCES

Bhaskar Roy's lyrical prose in the novel 'Border Crossers' evocatively explores the questions of identity, resilience, and socio-political strife through the intertwined lives of diplomat Arijit Basu, his fiancée Nandita Kapoor, and an undocumented Bangladeshi migrant navigating the fraught India-Bangladesh borderlands

- SANJEEV CHOPRA

Multiple borders, spanning diverse geographies with their unique demographics and layers of intersectionality of class, caste and gender come to the fore in this brilliantly evocative, lyrical offering of Bhaskar Roy. While the personal lives, hopes and aspirations of ex-diplomat Arijit Basu and his fiancée Nandita Kapoor are wrecked in their effort to rescue the undocumented migrant Rabeya, alias Rita from Bangladesh, the Gurkha guard Ram Bahadur Chhetri is able to 'manufacture a new identity', and hopefully a new life for both of them.

The story line is both familiar and unique. Year on year, hundreds, if not thousands cross the India-Bangladesh border where women, who are more vulnerable than men, opt for an acceptable Hindu name and even apply a bindi or a vermillion mark (if the situation so demands). Even as getting the new identity card is more difficult, it is not an impossibility paradigm as the new migrants often eke out an existence on the margins, with women preferring to be domestic helps. Thus, it is that Rita finds employment at Arjit Basu's flat in the newly constructed Blue Lotus Grove beyond the interstate border across the river Hindon.

Rita has been trained in the culinary art by her father who was employed by an American documentary filmmaker. She is wooed by Jamal, another migrant from her own village, who is very good in his task in shaping iron grills; however, he is spotted and indoctrinated by Islamic hardliners, and receives instructions from a Pakistani major who talks about 'the spineless veggie Hindus' with contempt. Jamal loves Rita to the core, but her feelings about him are ambivalent, especially as she fears the violent streak in him.