A Lost Home

The year 2016 remains significant for three reasons; my school’s centenary reunion, my parents’ final departure from Shillong and my first public confession of why and how I left the town

- Kishalay Bhattacharjee

To visualize Shillong sitting in Jatheri village in Haryana’s Sonepat district can be a daunting task. So my computer screen is a picture of the hill to which I woke up every morning since my birth; the sun rose behind the Lumparing Hill that had three biggish houses on its right flank and an unending staircase to its left leading to several small houses. Right at the foothill was a house named Veni Vidi Vici - the inscription that was visible even from our quaint wooden verandah. There was a Buddhist monastery somewhere hidden behind and the stream of lamas walking up the road was part of that landscape. Then one day the hill was on fire. I was in middle school.

It was a November night when I first heard the cries. The student’s agitation in neighbouring Assam was spilling across the borders and the student body in Meghalaya joined in the ‘anti foreigners’ agitation. Given my Bengali parentage, in one stroke, I came to represent the unwanted Bangaldeshi ‘foreigner’. That was not all; unwanted during those times meant you could even die. If you were lucky, you were assaulted or rendered homeless. I escaped almost all, except I was sucked into the binary of ‘outsider’ versus the ‘insider’.

A Perpetual ‘Outsider’