I asked him to sing and got Sanjoy Chatterjee, our sound recordist, to record him on his large tape recorder: the song was in Bangla, the Bhatia dialect, but as I listened I was astonished. The man said he was a rickshaw-puller in Guwahati and had taken a few days break to return home. He filled his lungs and sang a strong yet melodious song in the Bhatiali style. This style is far more prevalent in the northern districts of Bangladesh, especially Rongpur and Kurigram, than anywhere else though there are echoes of it in the Dhubri region.

The young man sang beautifully about the travails of people living on the banks of the Dharla river which flows through Kurigram, a few kilometres distance, and which is just across the border in Bangladesh.

So, when I asked him why he sang about the Dharla river in Bangladesh, he smiled in embarrassment and quickly left the place. The others stood by and sniggered but would not say anything, either for the record, or off it.

There is another incident, this one of April 1998. About twenty-eight kilometres west of Assam’s principal city of Guwahati is a famous religious site known as Hajo. This place is special to Hindus, and Buddhists and the Muslims. A short distance from the small town is the Islamic shrine of Pua Mecca, where a wandering Iraqi prince had brought the word of the Prophet Mohammed to the region in the eleventh century. For centuries, Hajo has been an excellent example of the traditional tolerance that has been a characteristic of society in Assam. On a hill, rising above the plains and paddy fields below and flanked by the Brahmaputra and sundry streams on three sides, it represents the first foothold of Islam in the North East. These days, you can watch aircraft take off and land at Borjhar airport, a few kilometres to the east across the river. It is a splendid setting, especially at dawn and at dusk.

On that muggy April afternoon, I had gone with a television unit to Pua Mecca to get some shots of the river, to show its calming and civilizing influence. We were talking with the maulvi, or head cleric of the masjid. He was an elderly Assamese Muslim, and a middle-aged man, thin and gruff-voiced, in a lungi and t-shirt was keeping him company. The man spoke a horribly convoluted Assamese, mixed with many Bengali words and phrases. Without realizing it, he let out the truth: ‘In our desh, Bangladesh, we have high respect for people like the maulvi saheb, we respected educated people.’