Before talking to Keramat, we had spoken with a number of householders at the Chilmari Ghat, both Hindus and Muslims, bonded by language and a history of shared suffering, for the river too had taken away their homes, time after time, year after year.

Thus, Nitya Kumar Ghosh, a high-school teacher, who said he was fifty-five, and lived on the river front at Chilmari, spoke of how his family had shifted six times because of the flooding. ‘Four times in my lifetime and twice during my father’s. The Old Chilmari lies in the river, some five miles from here.’ His son teaches at a nearby school and Ghosh, wearing a singlet, lungi and with a few days stubble on his face, said that the river perceived people as an enemy. ‘We are not its enemy but it pursues us—we go far away to escape it but it does not allow us to go, it follows us.’

Once, steamers from the Brahmaputra moved down to connect with the Ganga and into Bengal. ‘At that time, the river depth was twenty-five feet,’ Ghosh said.

Jute and foodgrains were unloaded from the boats and put on waiting railroad coaches. It was a sensible trading arrangement. Partition changed all that, standing common sense on its head and replacing it with bad economics. Communities which had been trading partners for decades and more were sundered. Road links were snapped and new markets were perforce created. Thus, a village found its farm lands in one country and its markets in the other. These days, the river is as shallow as a few feet in parts, filled by the silt from upstream. Where fields were once abundant, there are only homesteads. The homeless, displaced by the river, have set up house in Chilmari.

By the time I reached Bepari Para, it was late morning—it was a good twenty-five to twenty-eight kilometres from Kurigram. Firdouz and I had been delayed because of a long conversation earlier in the morning with the deputy commissioner (DC) of Kurigram, a large man who had fought in the Mukti Bahini during the Liberation war. He had insisted the previous evening that I go to a music programme by a woman singer who was visiting from Cachar in Assam.

Mamon had accompanied me and the guest of honour had been a tall, middle-aged blonde woman from a European aid agency. The woman singer, in a bright, shimmering green saree, was slightly off-key. Earlier, a dancer purported to perform her vigorous version of Bharata Natyam. Much of the time, she appeared to be a medieval soldier at a furious joust. A leap forward, then another back, sideways to the right and then to the left. This went on, but soon I started getting a headache, and, as politely as possible I slipped out.