‘Have you seen my Xonpahi, Pulok?’ Tung Chin cried out. He took out a photo and looking at Arunabh he repeated aloud, ‘Have you seen her? This is my Xonpahi and this is my Achin. My only child.’

Arunabh looked at the old and faded photograph. A thin young woman was sitting with a child on her lap. A smiling young man was standing behind them. The smudged photo was barely recognizable.

Arunabh looked at Tung Chin’s face. Where was the young man? How did this ace footballer, the bright and happy Tung Chin Ho, get so lost?

‘Deuta, I am Achin. I am Xonpahi’s son,’ Arunabh said, kneeling on the ground and touching his father’s feet.

At that moment, Hong was on stage reading from Arunabh’s book.

‘One day the Sino-Indian war ended. The warring statesmen left this world, one after another. Gone are Mao, Chow En Lai and Jawaharlal Nehru. Gone are Ayub Khan, Khrushchev, Kennedy and Macmillan. All the bitterness of the war has been wiped out. The Sino-Indian war is now a chapter of history. But there remains an invisible wound, which will never heal. There remains a source of tears, which will never dry. There remains a multitude of rootless people who will carry with them a legacy of loss to the end of time …’

Author’s Note and Acknowledgements

Author’s Note and Acknowledgements

One day in Makum, just about thirty years ago, someone told me, pointing towards a small group of Chinese people, ‘They had come to Assam during the Second World War.’ Until then I did not know anything more than that about the people of Chinese origin living in Assam. But I knew I was going to write a book about them someday.

The years rolled by with the idea still playing in my mind, though I hadn’t written a single line. If only I had truly realized the importance of the subject, I would have made an attempt much earlier. At the time, I never heard them mentioned in any way, nor had I ever noticed many Chinese people around me. By the time I actually started writing what I had planned, it was already a little too late. Most people who knew the history of the Chinese diaspora in Assam had already departed from this world. Therefore, much of the detail about the core of the Chinese society in its early days remained shrouded in a haze of obscurity. I was sure there might be a lot more about them than whatever information I had been able to glean. I hoped a day would come, in the not too distant future, when serious researchers and social anthropologists would be able to retrieve the slivers of that important history from oblivion and chronicle them appropriately.

It was about four years later that I come to learn about the incredible ordeal that the Chinese in Assam had to suffer during the Indo-China conflict of 1962.