Dreams and despair

The Rohingya in India long to return to Myanmar, but their children are assimilating into the local culture

- SANJIB KR BARUAH

Ramzan Ali was born on March 23, the day the holy month of Ramadan began. His father, 35-year-old Anwar Shah, was ecstatic as he held his fifth child in his arms. Had Ramzan been aware of where he was, he may not have shared his father’s happiness. Barely a month old, he lives amid squalor in a 9x9ft, tarpaulin-roofed hut in a slum at Madanpur Khadar in Delhi.

Ramzan is country-less. Anwar, his father, was born in Chopudaung village near Buthidaung, a town in Myanmar’s restive Rakhine State, in 1987. Anwar fled to Bangladesh in 1994 to escape the campaign of the Myanmarese military (known as the Tatmadaw) against the Rohingya community. In 2003, Anwar became part of a group that was repatriated to Chopudaung.

“Lekin zulm bardast nahin hua [I couldn’t bear the atrocities],” he says. He went back to Bangladesh in 2006, and the Kutupalong refugee camp at Cox’s Bazar became his address for the second time.

In 2012, Anwar crossed the open land border between India and Bangladesh, infamous for illegal immigration and contraband smuggling. He had hopes of finding a better life. Now, as part of a group of 52 families that live in the teeming Madanpur Khadar slum, he is more dazed than anything else at the turn life has taken.